


Nights When the Wolves Are Silent, and Only the Moon Howls

by Cluegirl, Defiler_Wyrm



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Apologies, Dominance challenge, Forgiveness, HYDRA's book, Hurt Steve means the feud is over, Hurt/Comfort, Infectious Lycanthropy, International Political Complications, M/M, Natasha Is a Good Bro, Non-canon cure for Bucky's triggers, Protective Bucky, Protective Tony, Rhodey Knows Things, Sam Is So Done, Secret Avengers - Freeform, Shuri for the win, Team Building, The Peasants are revolting!, Wakanda stays in its lane mostly, Werewolf culture 101, Werewolves, ca:cw fix it, comfort with a LOT of hurt, hiding out, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-09 13:22:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 77,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16450748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cluegirl/pseuds/Cluegirl, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defiler_Wyrm/pseuds/Defiler_Wyrm
Summary: “Could you drop all that stoic shit and be my freaking-the-hell-out wingman for just like, five seconds here?”Steve wasn’t sure he could think of anything he wanted less to do than to freak out about his wounds just then though, so he reached across his chest and gingerly patted Sam’s clenched knuckles.  “It’ll be fine,” he promised, believing it.  “Serum’s handled worse.”“You know, I actually believe you,”  Sam allowed after a long second of glaring.  “Which is deeply alarming, considering how much of your connective tissue I’ve touched in the last 4 hours.  Now you wanna tell me what Russoff’s men did to you that made it look like you got mauled by a bear?”Steve flinched, then breathed the memory down to size.  “Not a bear,” he murmured.  “Wolves.”





	1. The Pinky Swear

**Author's Note:**

> So here, at long last, is my contribution to the 2018 Captain America Big Bang! 
> 
> Art by the incomparable [Defiler_Wyrm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defiler_Wyrm/pseuds/Defiler_Wyrm) Links to art [here](https://66.media.tumblr.com/ce62c74a8c63597ce578ea99c2795574/tumblr_phc3g1rJJi1r8bw20o1_540.jpg), and here.
> 
> HUGE props to my Betae/cheerleading crew; Magicisgreen and Imperialeagle for alpha-reading and plotbashing; Chibisquirt, Beautytruthandstrangeness, Boogiewoogiebuglegal, and Pheylan for comma hunting, continuity scrubbing, moral support, and general unfucking of the text-in-progress. You guys are the actual reason I was able to write this monster in 3 months.

~* 2014, Avengers Tower, Manhattan *~  
~* Tony Stark *~

"So let me get this straight," Steve said, plucking the sealed, sterile vial from Tony's hand when he paused for breath. "Thor wants the team together again to go looking for Loki's staff, but before that happens, you want to shoot one of these," he gave the vial a shake so the tiny chips inside it tinkled against the glass. "into each of our necks so we can be tracked down electronically in case we disappear. For any reason. At all."

"Well, when you put it that way, of course it sounds creepy," Tony grumbled, rubbing at the soreness that still remained around his own preemptive injection site. "But it's not like that. Look, Natasha read me in on the details of your making the Hydra's Most Wanted list this spring, and I get why that'd make you hold back from this, but..." He hooked one leg over the arm of the sofa then, perching to face Steve's wary, skeptical, and still slightly bruised face because he couldn't wrestle his nerves down enough to properly sit. "But it's really, really not like what you're thinking."

"Oh?" Steve's eyebrows somehow managed an amused goad without dropping one ounce of their unimpressed angle. "And what is it you think I'm thinking, Stark?"

"It's not a leash, for one thing." Tony swiped the vial back. Steve let him. "It's not a pager that you can't turn off, or a GPS that tattles to a hundred spy satellites every time you go to that crappy little diner in Flatbush."

"Hey now, you leave Elaine's out of this."

Tony grinned, ignoring the insincere growl. "It's more like one of those MedicAlert things. You know, the 'Help, I've fallen and I can't get up' dealies?" The humor abruptly drained from Steve's face, and Tony grimaced, waving his hands between them as if that would dispel the image from both their minds. "Okay, no. Bad analogy, lemme just-"

But Steve's gaze slid away, shuttered down. His broad hands, knuckles still swollen where the doctor's report Tony wasn't supposed to have seen said they'd mostly been broken when he'd fallen into the Potomac two weeks ago, cupped his knees as if he was thinking of pushing to his feet and stalking off to the elevator, his own rooms, or maybe farther. 

"Tony," Steve said, "I'm just not comfortable with-"

"What if you'd had one in '45?" Tony blurted, on his feet before he'd even thought about moving. "March 4th, the final offensive against Hydra, when Schmidt took the Valkyrie-"

"I remember it, Tony" Steve clipped, eyes closed flinch-tight, hands fisted on his thighs. Tony thought of a December night in Tennessee, and of sitting hunched on the sidewalk, struggling to breathe while a smartalek kid's stupid, pointless questions had closed a breathless fist of panic around his chest.

"Sorry. I'm sorry, but. Steve, what if you'd had a subcutaneous chip on you then?" Tony went on, trying to be gentle now, trying not to crush either one of them with memories and regrets. "Something that could read your vital signs, and call for help – within a strictly closed system, completely shielded, completely secure." Tony licked his lips, trying to keep his voice low, earnest, and steady as he offered, "What if my father hadn't had to search all those years, because he'd known exactly where to find your plane, Steve? What if they'd found the wreck in a year, maybe less than that, 'cause the war was done in the North Atlantic by August, and they could have brought you home in time for Christm-"

Steve shoved to his feet so hard the entire sofa skidded backward with a screech that almost, but not quite, masked the strangled noise he tried to lock up tight in his throat. "Sorry," he breathed, shaking his head while Tony pretended he hadn't just skipped backward like a startled cat. "I just." He hooked a thumb at the door and turned away. "I'm gonna-"

"What if Barnes had one?" Tony tried, the lowest blow he could think of, and the one he was just about a hundred percent sure would win the case. "If you'd had the first clue where to look for him in '44, wouldn't you have broken every rule, and bucked every order to go back for him and bring his body home?"

"Goddamn it, Tony," Steve pleaded, neck bowed, shoulders braced to a guilt that seemed to weigh more than the world. Tony knew that kind of weight, and how quickly the invisible, hairline fractures it caused could give way to just the right kind of push. And Tony had known from the moment he watched the video footage of Cap plummeting like a rag doll from the Helicarrier, that he would damn well give that push if it meant he never had to feel that particular gut-clutching, helpless sense of loss again.

Maybe the irony would be funny later. 

In the moment though, savage and certain, Tony simply rattled the chips in their phial again, and stepped up to Steve's side. "And what if it had even been able to tell you that he hadn't died when he fell, Steve?" he asked, holding out the glass vial on his palm, as if offering a skittish horse a lump of sugar. "Wouldn't that have been worth a little show of trust to your teammate? To your friend?"

Steve sniffed hard, then tipped his head back, staring at the ceiling as if auguring the future in the acoustic tiles. "All right, you son of a whoremonger," he managed after a long and heavy moment, "Tell me how it works."

~* 2016, Presidential manor, Mt Wundagore, Transia *~  
~* Sam Wilson *~

It was the kind of plan nobody liked, especially in the wake of the shit show that was the Sokovia Accords.

The team spread too thin; no comms; scant and sketchy intel; Barton, Wanda, and Sam half a mile, ten minutes, and a hard fight away from being able to provide extraction, cover or medical support for Steve, Scott, and Natasha if the op should go sideways. And also unhelpful was the solid five hours of radio silence from the insertion team, leaving the rest of them waiting around at their various stations with nothing to do but imagine all the ways that things could go terribly, terribly...

"Something's wrong," Barton muttered over the com.

Sam kept his exhausted sigh on the inside, adjusted his goggles and scanned the icy woods one more time. "Nothing's moving out here," he whispered, then stole a glance at his phone. The midnight com check-in had passed without a peep from the team in the castle, but it was only twenty past now, and Steve's plan had called for a hold-off of two hours before bringing the cavalry in.

"Ok, like _nothing_ nothing, or like 'nothing unusual' nothing though," Barton came back, frustration and worry clear in his voice, "because those are two very different kinds of nothing, Wilson."

"Nothing unusual?" Sam griped, trying not to shiver as the wind blew sleet into his face, "Barton, I grew up inside the DC Beltway! The fuck am I supposed to know what 'nothing unusual' looks like in the goddamn primeval forests of Transia? Ask Wanda what looks unusual."

"You think we had creepy forests like this in Novi Grad?" Wanda scoffed, voice tense and low. "Sokovians know enough to stay out of the mountains in winter – there's no food, no water, and everything here wants to eat you."

Barton groaned in disgust. "Aw, you Townies...this is why I should have been on perimeter."

"Oh sure; except for how you're the only one who can fly that Quinjet through these woods when we get the sign for evac," Sam gave in to the urge to grumble as he knocked the accumulation of slush off his goggles. "That one's on you, Hawkeye."

The weather had called for snow overnight in the Wundagore mountain forest, but that just went to prove that meteorologists in Transia were no more accurate than anywhere else. The sleet had started up about four hours after Steve had taken off overland with a backpack full of shape charges and a topo map, and it had turned the road that wound down from President Russoff's private fortress into one long, winding sheet of black glass. 

The precip was slowing down now, but the Presidential limo that had collected Natasha from the hotel that afternoon would definitely not be making it back down that road again anytime soon. Sam wasn't even sure a tank could manage that without wiping right out.

Which might actually have been something Russoff was counting on, come to think of it. Invite the hottie to dinner, and whoops! Guess you'll have to stay the night now, won't you honey? Only since I wasn't expecting company, the guestroom's just not ready, but that's OK, I have a Carpathia King-size in my suite...

"Yeah, well we are doing some flying lessons before I head back Stateside, you two and me," Barton grumbled, probably dry and relatively warm in the Quinjet's cockpit. "Natasha's been my partner since before the Avengers were a sparkle in Fury's eye, and I do _not_ like her being in there without backup."

Sam charitably let the backhanded insult to his own competence go, and satisfied himself with a glare at the woods through the goggles as he muttered. "She's got Scott in her purse, and Steve on her six. She'll be all right."

Barton, of course, didn't let it go. "Lang is a burglar, not a spy, and Steve has no experience with espionage of any kind!" he said. "Steve Rogers is a six foot two, bond selling poster boy whose extremely memorable face was splashed all over international news last spring, which makes him at best a goddamn distrac -"

"Movement," Wanda yelped suddenly, and Barton's rant cut off mid syllable. "Something is happening at the castle."

"What _kind of_ -"

"The gunfire kind," Sam shot back, extending the wings of his flight kit. Grateful as he was that Natasha had stolen it back for him before turning up to recruit the team for this little op, it was still gonna be a stone bitch for Sam to maneuver between the trees if he had to provide covering fire or pull off a speed rescue. Then there came a sudden bloom of light, a rumble following on its heels like thunder after lightning.

“South wall,” Wanda’s voice was the first through the comms.

Sam was half a breath behind her. “East wall. Looks like part of the main tower is down.”

“Okay kids, which is it?” Barton griped, “I didn’t give Cap enough C4 to blow the whole damn place up.”

“I can’t see the guardhouse,” Wanda replied, testy and scared, “but the main approach is buried in rubble now.”

“You see Cap or Widow yet, Wanda?” Sam demanded, scanning the billowing clouds of dust and smoke for any sign of them.

“No, and --” another seismic rumble cut her off, and she gasped. “The bridge just fell in! The road's cut off now!”

Barton cursed for all of them, and Sam could hear the Quinjet’s ignition whine over his mic. “If they’re not already across the river-”

Secondary extraction point,” Sam barked out, tightening the straps on his wings, and thanking God the sleet had stopped, “Wanda, go!”

“On my way,” she called, the whispery static of her power sheeting over her words.

“And don’t get shot!” Clint called. None of them yet knew whether Wanda’s control over her powers had recovered enough from the suppression collar to let her keep herself aloft and deflect bullets at the same time. Getting knocked out of the sky by Russoff’s black market artillery would be about the worst way to answer that question.

The silence took them for a few long moments as the wind gusted up high, and shoved the storm front above them aside to show black tatters of sky. And also a brightening glow of silver where the moon would be breaking the horizon at any moment.

The shiver that raced down Sam's spine was the kind that his Nana always had called 'someone walking over your grave'. For all he didn't count himself a superstitious man, Sam Wilson hadn't made it alive out of two tours in Afghanistan by _not_ listening to his gut.

“Barton, fuck the timeline. Activate their comms and trackers.” But even as Sam said it, he noticed a thrashing about a hundred yards off in the ice-glazed forest, well away from the road, and moving without any concern for stealth at all.

“I got movement,” he told the others, and switched his goggles to infrared. The bloom of heat signature was instant, man-sized, and from what he could see of it through the trees, doing a clip only a couple men in the world could sustain even on a paved track, let alone under full tree cover. Sam could see other flickers of heat too, farther off in the woods, too spread out to guess at their number, but not so fast, nor running quite so hot as that first, biggest bogey.

“I got em,” He confirmed, already diving out of the tree blind just as Steve burst into the clear at a dead run, Natasha slung limply across his shoulders. Sam tacked his glide to take one hard-banked circle over the clearing as Steve dropped to his knees in the snow. The pursuit was still too far out though, and too silent to pin down with suppressing fire just yet. And also, Sam could see the black shine of moonlit blood slicking down the front of Natasha’s slinky little cocktail dress as Steve pulled her around into his arms.

“What the hell happened, man?” he hissed, dropping to Steve’s side and kneeling to run the quickest battlefield triage on Natasha that he knew how to do. “Where’s Lang? This wasn’t supposed to be a blowing everything up operation!”

“I know,” Steve wheezed, holding Natasha across his knees so Sam could check the angle of her wounds. “Bombs weren’t ours. EMP. Cooked our comms. Scrambled Russoff’s security network too. Some kind of. Peasant uprising.” He grimaced, shook his head as if his ears were still ringing from the blasts.

“Shit,” Sam swore. In his earpiece, Clint started cursing in Spanish. “So all this was for nothin’?”

“No. Russoff had it, just like we thought,” Steve said, glancing back at the treeline and the distant column of smoke and dust – moon-silvered above, fire-lit below. “Nat passed it to Lang before the staff started shooting.”

“That how Nat got shot up?” Sam asked, checking her pupil response, and relaxing just a tiny bit when she grumbled and flinched at the light.

“Nat got shot?” Barton yelped over the comm. “On a fucking retrieval op? By _peasants_?!”

“No,” Steve bit out, and the word hung hard in the frozen air, “That was Russoff.”

“Huh,” Sam stole a glance, read disaster in the tense angles of his Captain’s face. “He dead now?”

A muscle in Steve’s jaw flexed as he shook his head. “Not yet." Then he took a deep breath and blew it out white in the darkness. "Sam, tell Hawkeye to get in the air. I need him and Wanda to meet Lang at the secondary evac site. Lang had security on his tail when he lit out, but I don't know if he shook them or not.”

“Sonofabitch,” Barton swore, not waiting for Sam to repeat it over the comms. "On it." Then the Quinjet burst upward from its clearing a quarter mile to the West; engines brilliant and blue in the dark for a second, before the anti-tracking kicked in and it rippled from sight, muting Barton’s com signal as it disappeared.

“Wanda’s already en route to secondary,” Sam said as Steve hefted Natasha in closer to his chest so he could shove back up to his feet. “She should be reporting in any minute now.”

Steve shook his head and shoved Natasha into Sam’s arms. “They’ve all got jammers of some kind. Security; the insurgents; the kitchen staff. I need you to fly her out of here,” he said as Sam got up as well. “Get her to the Quinjet. Get her patched up if you can.”

“Steve, there’s only so much I can do with a field kit,” he warned, bracing to take Natasha’s weight, and nodding toward the black bulwark of forest. “And I don’t know if it’s Russoff’s mercs, or the local pitchfork brigade that followed you out of there, but you’re trailing an awful big honor guard right now.”

Steve grimaced, flexed his left hand as if he could feel the straps of his missing shield around it, then shook his head. “I know,” he said, and leaned in close to swipe both of Sam’s guns while his hands were full of bleeding redhead. “Just get her clear. We won’t be able to defend her if she’s on the ground when they catch up.”

Sam didn’t bother to protest the theft – he was pretty sure Steve had burned all his own ammo just getting the two of them that far from the President’s castle. Instead, he hit the thrusters on his kit, and ran through the ice-crusted snow to get enough lift to take off.

“Get everyone off the ground,” Steve called up to him, every inch the Captain as the cold, dry snow from under the pines blew up around him in a cloud. Sam circled the clearing, climbing as fast as his flight kit could manage with Natasha dangling from his arms.

Steve’s call was faint over the thrusters’ whine, but Sam felt it in the pit of his belly all the same. “I’ll hold them off till you get back.”

~* 2016, Avengers HQ, Upstate NY. *~  
~* Tony Stark *~

At first, Tony didn't notice the alert at all.

 _War Pigs_ was turned all the way up, so his bones were rattling along with every loose tool, coffee cup, and glass pane in his workshop. His brain was fully engaged in elaborate calculus of leaping, brilliant light while his hands laid down perfect, tiny roads of solder in the silicon landscape before him. This music made an impenetrable wall between the world’s moronic indignities, and Tony's perfect, precious Zone, where all the sums tallied without recourse to Dark Matter; all solutions were deft and elegant; and Occam's razor found no fat at all to cut.

That lasted until _Paranoid_ gave way to _Planet Caravan_ , and the subtle, repetitive tone stopped meshing with the background noise.

The soldering iron made a sharp hiss as Tony stabbed it at the damp sponge and then whipped his magnifying goggles off to glare around the workshop. But nothing was blinking. Well no, lots of things were blinking – this was his workshop, after all – but nothing was blinking in time with that goddamned, irritating _noise_.

"Music off," he snapped, pushing his stool back from the workbench and turning a slow, angry circle. The low, resonant beep was more noticeable in the silence, but he still couldn't tell where the hell it was coming from, and it was starting to freak him out more than a little bit. "FRIDAY, what's that noise?" he demanded as Dum-E rolled toward him, hopefully brandishing the empty fire extinguisher Tony had finally given up trying to take away from him.

"Which noise, Boss?" the AI asked. Dum-E's beep mimicked the tone of her question precisely as Tony spun another circle on the stool and glared harder.

"The beep," he grumbled, hunching low to peer at the underside of his desk. Nothing there. "That one," he added after it sounded again, "B flat, I think, an octave down from middle. There it is again. Where the _hell_ is that coming from?"

"Analyzing," she clipped back, "Please maintain silence..."

Tony did so, one hand on Dum-E's arm hinge to keep him still as well. FRIDAY was as rattled as Tony was himself, or she'd have sounded a lot more smug about essentially telling him to shut the hell up and let her work. 

Three beeps passed, slower than his heartbeat while he held his breath and waited. _Buzz. Buzz. Buzz._ It wasn't loud at all, but Tony's nerves were singing with alarm, so that he'd have sworn he felt each tone echo in his bones.

"I've located the source, Boss," FRIDAY broke the silence at last.

"Then turn it the hell off!" he yelled. The stool spun away behind him as he thrust to his feet, that tone ringing insistently in his ears.

"I don't think I have authority," she answered.

"Then tell me where the damn thing is, and I'll turn it off." Tony plucked up a good, solid wrench from his toolkit, figuring that at this point he reserved the right to smash the whatever-it-was into small, silent bits if it didn't seem likely to explode on him.

"The tone seems to be coming from behind your right ear, Boss," FRIDAY answered, all salt and sass. "and if you don't mind me saying, I don't think that'll be your best choice of adjustment tools for it."

Then memory kicked him hard, and Tony felt his skin ice over with sudden alarm. The Pinky Swear! The goddamned _Pinky Swear_! The wrench clanged like a bell on the concrete floor as Tony dropped it and slapped his hand to his neck. 

The tiny chip buzzed its alarm again, and this time Tony felt it; a trapped mosquito itch against the second knuckle of his little finger, the tone deeper now that he pushed from the outside. 

"Sonofabitch," Tony breathed, closing his eyes to let the horror rising in his guts have its one, uninterrupted moment. "Steve Rogers, what the _hell_ have you done?"


	2. Mud & Guts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trips are taken, resources are loaned, and calls are made.

~* 2016, Dragorin village, Transia *~  
~* Steve Rogers *~

“Shit!”

Steve blinked at the cat, breaking their staring match in surprise.

He was not so much confused that it would cuss – the cat had been glaring at Steve with solid disdain ever since the villagers carried him into the old woman’s parlor and laid him out beside the hearth for her to tend. There was no question the big ginger tomcat had Opinions about how much of the fur rug beside the stove Steve was taking up, and probably also how much time its owner was spending on his wounds instead of providing it a comfy lap as well.

No, it was clear the cat hated Steve and wanted him gone, but what Steve couldn’t work out was why its lips hadn’t moved when it finally got annoyed to cuss him out loud.

“Aw man Steve, what did you do?” Also it was weird how the cat’s voice sounded _exactly_ like Sam’s.

“Jus’ lyin’ here,” he managed to tell it, only wondering once the words had left his lips why it was the animal seemed to know English when nobody else in the village understood a word. “Cn do th’ss...” he gasped, tried not to flinch as the deep gashes across his right cheek gaped and stung and stole his attention from the other wounds for a few seconds, “...all day.”

The cat blinked at him, one ear taking on a decidedly skeptical angle before it thrashed its thick tail once, and dismissed Steve’s challenge with a huff. Then it looked past Steve’s shoulder toward the kitchen door, opened its mouth, and… made a cat noise?

Steve frowned at it, gathering strength to challenge the rudeness of it speaking yet another unknown language to spite him when he’d seen that its English was perfectly fine. Only something heavy thudded to the boards beside Steve’s makeshift bed, and the cat abandoned its post with a triple-flip of its thick, stripey tail before he could find the words.

“Rude,” Steve began. But then strong, chilly fingers caught Steve’s chin gently on the uninjured side, and turned his head toward the window, and oh hey, when had Sam gotten there?

“Jesus,” Sam murmured, holding Steve’s face still so he couldn’t flinch away while he did that awful thing with the flashlight. “Jesus fucking Christ, Steve, what the hell?” And it had to be bad, didn’t it, if Sam, the son of a preacher, was taking the Lord’s name in vain. “What’d they do to tear you up like this?” He lifted the heavy blanket away before Steve could clutch at it, and all Steve could do then was hold his breath and try not to faint like he had the last time someone had done that.

It was a close thing. Steve’s head filled up with snarling and the stench of guts; pounding blood and roaring guns and screams and flashing teeth and blood in dark gouts, like ink across moonlit snow. Sam’s horrified voice buzzed distantly over his head, and there were tuggings and pushings that made his breath stutter in his horrified throat, but Steve didn’t faint. And when he could breathe past the clench of agony again, Steve had remembered the important thing.

“Sam,” Steve gurgled, then spit the blood from his mouth to try again. “Is N’tasha...”

“Fine,” Sam clipped, digging a prefilled syringe from his kit and turning to look at Steve’s left arm like it offended him. “She’s fine. Russo’s bullet went through clean and hot,” Sam leaned to peek at Steve’s right arm, which had been bound up tight from elbow to wrist after Dynya had set the bones last night. “She’d stopped bleeding before we even got her to the safe house. Clint and Scott had to sit on her to keep her from following Wanda and me out to look for you.” His lips pressed for a moment, then he sighed. “Do I even want to see what your legs look like under there, or should I just give you this ketamine in your neck?”

Steve thought about that for less than a second, then turned his chin up and away, surrendering to the injection of painkillers without even his usual token protest. He just wanted the pain to back off and let him _think_. The needle prick at Steve’s throat hardly made a dent in the wall of pain-noise his nerves were struggling under, but the floating, drowsy wash of comfort that followed it was almost immediate, and for awhile at least, Steve was content to let it drift him right away.

It wouldn’t hold him for long – no drug ever did – but with Sam there, Steve was fairly sure the cat wouldn’t get the chance to try and suffocate him in his sleep again. 

So that was something, at least.

~* Tony Stark *~

_If you have this number, then you know who you’re calling, and you know what to do after the beep._

**Beep**

“Seriously Steve? **Seriously?** What the hell happened to ‘If You Need Me I’ll Be There,’ Desperado? Look, call me back, okay? Pronto. You know why.”

_Call ended._

~* Dragorin village, Transia *~  
~* Steve Rogers *~

Three times, the waves bumped Steve up against the shores of consciousness, only for another drugging jab to shove him back out into the current again.

The fourth time though, Sam was across the room, arguing with someone in hushed tones and halting German, so Steve made it out of the undertow without getting another shot.

Waking up was quick and fairly horrible, but given how torn up he’d been, he hadn’t expected any different. Hoped for different, maybe, but even the serum couldn’t handle a mauling like that in one sleep. Still, the sick, sloppy, weltering pain from before had sharpened into something that held the promise of healing rather than of decay. While Steve knew intellectually that was a very good thing, the skinny kid inside him, who’d grown sick to his soul of pain by the time he saw his 6th  
birthday, still felt a little bit like whining over it.

“ _… the mud though?”_ Sam was clinging to his clinical voice with all the determination he could muster in his scant German, but Steve could still hear the thread of horror running through the question. “ _Some cuts were that deep. The peritoneum! I don’t know how bad for sepsis, but the mud..._ ”

“ _I know, Mr. Brown,_ ” a woman replied, her German miles better than Sam’s, but still clearly not her first choice of language. _”I am sorry for this, but my grandmother is the closest thing to a doctor we have on this side of the mountain. My brothers did not feel your friend could survive if they had tried to move him farther._ ”

That wasn’t precisely an accurate statement, given that Steve was certain the men who had found him hadn’t known he was alive at all until they’d tried to take his boots off. Still, he appreciated the woman’s tact in keeping the details from Sam. The men might not have told her they were out robbing corpses when they found him, after all, and what use did dead men have for good quality combat boots, anyway?

“ _I’m happy they found him,_ ” Sam answered, sounding harried. “ _And I’m happy your Grandmother healing for him, just… the mud confuse me. In my medical training they tell us to keep dirt out of wounds._ ”

The woman chuckled, low and pleasant. “ _Now you sound like the city doctor. He comes twice a year, for shots and to make lists, and complain that our Dynya is a fraud, and people should not come to her for cures. And it is true her cures are traditional, but please believe me when I tell you that she has never lost a patient to wounds like these.”_

Steve heard Sam’s breath catch on a giggle that sounded like it had nothing to do with happiness of any kind. _”She has seen wounds like these often then?”_

“ _More often than anyone wishes, Mr. Brown,”_ the woman replied, and it took Steve a moment to remember about the whole ‘using pseudonyms so they wouldn’t be found by the CIA’ part of Natasha’s plan. _”You are sure you should move him though? My Grandmother wants to keep him two more weeks to be sure the cure is properly set._ ”

“ _Yes, we must go,_ ” Sam said, and Steve could hear the clatter of equipment going back into his medical kit. “ _This village is too close to the President’s estate for a stranger to recovering here. If my friend follow the rumors to find him here, then Russoff’s men, or the opposition can do that too. We want to bring no trouble._ ”

“ _I will heal,_ ” Steve muttered, finally dragging his eyes open to find the parlor draped in the lamplit shadows of evening. “ _I feel better already,_ ” he said to Sam and a brown haired woman Steve couldn’t remember having seen before. Both turned to glare at Steve with offended skepticism, so he summoned up a thin, weak smile and offered, “ _Please tell Baba Dynya I’m grateful for her cure and-”_

And the ginger cat chose that moment to walk right across Steve’s bandaged chest, effectively crashing every trace of his language skills into random vowel sounds and wheezing. Sam cursed and scrambled toward him, but the woman got there first, snatching the cat away from Steve’s weakly flailing hand. Its claws ripped the bandages like they were tissue, but she didn’t hesitate to hike the unrepentant murder-beast onto her shoulder and bustle out of the room, scolding him like a toddler as she went.

Sam, meanwhile, squatted down at Steve’s side, one fist shoved up against his mouth in an obvious attempt to keep himself from laughing. “Well I guess that answers where all the fur came from,” he managed after a moment. Then he peered at the bandages swathing Steve’s chest and belly, tugged a corner smooth here, repaired a knot there, and finally let his hands alight, soft as butterflies, on Steve’s shoulder and undamaged arm. “So, you with me this time, Nomad?”

“Five by five,” Steve sighed once he’d wrestled down the unwise urge to cough. “Take more than a cat to kill me, I promise.”

“Jesus Christ man, shut up,” Sam blurted, anger in his eyes like heat lightning now they were alone. “I just about had to repack your guts, OK? I used up _all_ my suture silk and pressure bandages between you and Miz Black today, and you should know this is a top grade combat pack, and it came with a metric fuckton of both those things, so just...” He stopped, rubbing a palm over his face, not quite scrubbing the words “fucking mud” out of hearing. “Could you drop all that stoic shit and be my freaking-the-hell-out wingman for just like, five seconds here?”

Steve wasn’t sure he could think of anything he wanted less to do than to freak out about his wounds just then though, so he reached across his chest and gingerly patted Sam’s clenched knuckles. “It’ll be fine,” he promised, believing it. “Serum’s handled worse.”

“You know, I actually believe you,” Sam allowed after a long second of glaring. “Which is deeply alarming, considering how much of your connective tissue I’ve touched in the last 4 hours. Now you wanna tell me what Russo’s men did to you that made it look like you got mauled by a bear?”

Steve flinched, then breathed the memory down to size. “Not a bear,” he murmured. “Wolves.”

Sam sat back on his ass with a thud. “WOLVES did this? Like… actual animals?”

“Really big ones. A lot of them, too. Smart. Came at me all at once, and… without the shield, I couldn’t-”

“Shit...” Sam scrubbed at his face, obviously trying to wipe some vestige of bedside manner into place. “Yeah, OK. I guess they don’t call it dogpiling for nothing, do they?”

“Heh,” and that was as close to laughing as Steve’s belly wanted to get. “Guess Russoff’s mercs must’ve trained them. The whole pack. Villagers figured… I’d been fighting the wolves, so I must be okay.” He shifted, grimaced at the sudden burn of… well, everything.

“Sorry man,” Sam said, folding his boots under his knees. “I used all the K juice I had getting you cleaned out and stitched up. You’ll have to chew your belt until we get back to the lodge.” He shook his head, and stole a careful glance toward the kitchen before muttering, “Gone quicker if I hadn’t had to wipe mud outta your guts first, I ain’t gonna lie.”

Steve dug up a smile at that, though it felt strained and weak even before Sam’s scowl met it halfway. “Dynya said it was magic dirt though. I think.” Steve grunted as he felt his insides shift beneath the bandages. “Her German's kinda sketchy, and I don’t speak a word of whatever it is they use around here.”

“Symkarian, according to Wanda,” Sam replied, resting a gentle finger under Steve’s ear to track his pulse. “And luckily it’s close enough to Sokovian for her to understand the rebel patrols gossiping about you when we went back to look for your happy ass in the woods. She’s out there right now, trying to get a truck or a horse cart or something so we can take you back to the safehouse.”

“Jeep, as it turns out,” Wanda said, striding into the parlor in a very good imitation of a Natasha style entrance, right down to the satisfied air clinging to her like the snowflakes on her hair. “Nobody on this side of the mountain can keep horses because of the wolves. Or because of the President. Their accent is very strange, makes it hard to tell which they mean. But they have an old diesel jeep that still runs, and they said we can use it to take Steve up the mountain.”

Steve blinked, worry settling like a cold blanket through the weight of his pain. “Their only jeep? And they’re letting us take it?”

“Yes, if we go now,” Wanda replied, flexing her fingers just so. “There’s a storm coming over the ridge, and the old uncles say it will bring a lot of snow.”

Steve braced himself as the red smoke cradled him up from the floor, but the pain stayed level, unaware of the change, even as the heavy blankets bundled him into a tight, warm cocoon. “But they’ll need it back,” he insisted as Sam clambered to his feet and went to open the outside door, “The jeep. If it’s the only one in the village?” The people here lived tight, hard lives, and Russoff’s presidency was barely a goosestep away from a full on dictatorship, with all the traditional trimmings of corruption. Excess for the wealthy, and poverty for everyone else. Steve knew the villagers here couldn’t possibly spare a whole car without keenly feeling the loss.

Wanda shrugged and eased Steve out the door. “They don’t seem worried about that.”

And sure enough, Steve could see the men – the same ones who’d found him in the woods near Russoff’s presidential palace – loading supplies into the vehicle with the closest thing to cheerful industry he’d seen since crossing into Transia a week ago. One of them spotted them coming, nudged the other, and the two of them gave him a credible military salute… with the wrong hand, but under the weight of the dropping penny, Steve wasn’t in any mood to correct them on it.

“They think we’re CIA,” he said to Sam, wide eyed and a little breathless, “They think we came here to topple the President, and-”

“That’s exactly what they think,” Sam muttered back through a smile and a left-handed salute of his own, “And since you _did_ technically kill the President last night, we decided not to correct them.”

“I...” Steve blinked as a snowflake drifted into his face “I did… I did? No, that’s not…?” Because he’d _meant_ to kill Russoff, after watching from the roof across the courtyard as the man had pulled Natasha in close, as if for a kiss, or a whisper, only to shoot her in the belly instead. He’d felt sure he would get the chance too, when he’d heard the pursuit coming after them through the woods, but when the pack had caught up, it had been only wolves. Their human trainers hadn’t even come close enough that Steve could even see them in the fray.

“That can’t be right,” he murmured as Wanda lifted him gently through the jeep’s back door and settled him across the bench.

“They found you with his head in your hands,” Sam told him, hoisting the medical kit into the foot well under Steve’s shoulder as Wanda headed back to talk to the men outside the house, “And you know trauma can mess with brain chemistry, not to mention the ketamine, so don’t sweat it if the details are fuzzy.

“I...” he sighed, eyes tracing the worn stitching on the jeep’s ancient canvas roof as Sam climbed into the shotgun seat, “I guess so...”

“Look,” Sam said, half turning to glare at Steve over the bench seat, “Even if they do think you were sent here by President Ellis to topple Russoff’s regime, nobody who’s seen your injuries thinks it was anything but self defense. So you can just save your worrying for the road conditions and Wanda’s driving, okay? ‘Cause both of those are far more of an immediate danger to us.”

Good old Sam, knowing exactly what to say to completely derail Steve’s anxiety, and make him hold his breath to avoid the pain of laughing instead. “Why’s Wanda driving?” Steve asked after a quick glance around.

The question won him an embarrassed side eye with the reply. “Cause apparently they ain’t heard of automatic transmissions this far into vampire country,” Sam admitted grudgingly, then thrust his chin defiantly at Steve’s dry chuckle. “Shut it, you. Ain’t like your lame ass ever offered to teach me how to drive a stick!”

“Figured Natasha was more your type for that kinda lesson,” Steve leered, as comically as he could with half his face swollen and pinched up tight around new stitches. Sam’s single-finger reply proved that he’d read the expression as intended though.

Steve shifted, meaning to kick the back of the seat in retaliation, when a large carpet bag he hadn’t noticed beside his knee gave a sudden and fierce wriggle. It was all Steve could do to keep from screaming like a child at the unexpected movement.

“Sam!” he yelped, panting as Wanda pulled open the driver’s side door and climbed in behind the wheel, “WhatsInTheBag?!”

“My med kit,” Sam replied, the silent ‘ _dumbass_ ’ clearly audible in the phrase.

“NoTheOtherBag!” Steve pulled his feet up high as it thrashed again, and ohh mercy but that was a bad idea, wasn’t it? “The… what’s in the oTHERBAG!?”

“Relax Steve,” Wanda said, peering over the seat, “Babka Dynya said she’d only let us take you in the jeep if we took Little Brother and some of her medicinal preparations too.”

“She said what?” Sam asked affronted.

“She said _what?_ ” Steve squeaked, horrified as the worn doctor’s clutch tipped over and its clasp caught ominously on the rim of the bench seat. The bag settled against his leg, and its cargo gave a savage yowl, as if it just knew Steve was out there, and blamed him personally for its predicament.

“Little Brother?!” Steve managed to wheeze, torn between the urge to snatch his foot out of range, and holding it very, very still, “The damned CAT?! That thing wants to kill me! Sam saw it try! He knows! You can’t bring it back to the safehouse!”

“Steve, my hand to God, if you tear out all those stitches,” Sam warned darkly, half turned in his seat to reach for Steve’s shoulder.

Steve couldn’t help it – he yanked his leg out from under the bag, then had to gasp and clutch at his guts as the pain made blood roar like a much bigger cat in his ear. “You can’t leave me back here with it alone!” he pleaded against the screaming cat and the jeep’s starting rumble.

“It’s starting to snow now,” Wanda’s singsong cut across the noise, “And I need to concentrate on the road.” Steve saw her fingers in the rearview, crooked just so and wreathed in scarlet smoke. “So you both need to to calm down right now!”

And, as much as Steve wanted to fight the threads of red exhaustion that reached for him, and the snarling, struggling carpetbag, he knew it would be no use. At least, he considered as his eyelids drooped closed and the trapped cat surrendered its frenzy, if Wanda’s knockout lasted longer than the drugs did, he might just get the worst of the healing up over with before they got back to the lodge.

And at least the cat would be asleep too.

He hoped.

~* Tony Stark *~

**Beep**

“God damn it, Steve, where the hell are you? FRIDAY, how’s that signal trace coming?”

“Not good, Boss. There’s some kind of encryption on it that I’ve never encountered before, and it’s sending ghosts in every direction. I’ve got pings in Transia, Croatia, Miami, Johannesburg, Bangkok, Cartagena, and Madripoor.”

“God DAMN it, Steve!”

_Call ended_

Wundagore Mountain, Transia *~  
~* Sam Wilson *~

“Wait, Wakanda?” Sam asked, shouting over the noise of the jeep, the road, the storm, and Steve’s snoring in the back seat, “Fuck the plan, we are way off script now! So why the hell are you taking her to Wakanda when there’s a hospital less than a hundred miles away?”

“Because she’s awake enough to insist,” Barton came back, tone hushed and furtive, “and she gets really mean when her medical choices are not respected. Besides, the city’s a mess right now. We couldn’t get one of ours anywhere near a hospital or clinic without taking on the Loyalists and the Rebels both. According to radio chatter, Transian military’s about an hour away from initiating a nationwide no-fly zone too, so if we’re getting anything or anyone out of here without a fight, it has to be now.”

“Can they even take off this?” Wanda mused, eyes fixed on the road which, to Sam, looked like nothing more than trees and a fuck of a lot of snow going past far too fast to be sane or safe.

“In the Quinjet we can,” Barton replied, apparently having turned his com filters up high for the conversation, “With the government cannibalizing itself right now, all the neighbors will be looking for opportunities to meddle. I don’t want to get caught in Transian airspace in anything that can’t out fly and outgun a Mig.”

And the Quinjet’s cloaking would make it just about the only thing that could get out of Transia with the eyes of the world focused on the tiny mountain nation. Damn it. 

“So what, we hang tight in Russoff’s hunting lodge till you come back for us then?” Sam asked, fully understanding, but not liking the plan even one tiny little bit, “Forage for berries and hope that nobody local turns up to ask why we’re squatting?”

Whatever snark Barton was planning to clap back with evaporated into a yelp and a scrabble of friction that had Sam’s imagination leaping to terrible conclusions. But before he could ask what was going on, Natasha’s voice took over – rough as a mile of bad road, but still a damn sight better than a HYDRA strike team, or a fucking avalanche, both of which Sam’s imagination had visited.

“Barton and Lang can’t wait for you to get here, Wilson,” she said, ignoring the fright she’d given him, “Flight to Wakanda’s going to eat up half the time they have left before the amnesty offer expires, and you know we have to get that book out of the country before they close the borders.”

And yeah, that had been the deal all along – part of the plan Natasha had waiting for them along with their impounded gear when they’d followed Steve out of the Raft and into the Quinjet. One low-impact run on a confirmed target; acquisition, not demolition; minimal body count, and if they won their ounce of prevention in time, repatriation under house arrest for any Avenger who wanted it. Except for the ones who’d made US politicians look bad last year, of course, but at least Barton, Lang, and Sam could all go home and wear an ankle bracelet to the BBQ if they wanted to.

Sam had not wanted to.

Sam wanted to tell the court exactly where it could shove its lack of due process and inhumane prisoner treatment, and how long to leave it there too. Sam also didn’t have children or a wife waiting for him at home though, so he damned well wasn’t gonna judge the other two for taking the deal that would bring their families back together again… But only if they made it to court on time.

“Shit.” Sam wanted to pinch at the growing headache between his eyes, but didn’t quite dare to let go of the terror strap to do so. ‘Cause goddamn, those trees were _close_ to the road! “Just… at least tell me you secured the place? Because I ain’t gonna lie, Cap is in rough shape right now, and Wanda and me aren’t gonna have the manpower to watch all the sightlines while we look after him.”

“Secured and supplied,” she assured him. “Russoff liked his luxury goods, even in estates he never bothered coming to. There’s wood, water, clean beds, a full oil tank in the basement, freezer, pantries, and armory all stocked up. Lang got the security system up and looped as well, so you’ve got camera coverage of the whole lodge as well as the barn, the road in, and some of the woods. But nobody outside the lodge will be able to pick the signal up.”

“All right. All right. What about medical supplies? You know I had to hit my kit pretty hard last couple of days.”

The hesitation on the other end of the phone gave him all the let down Sam needed. He cursed, glaring back over his shoulder at the too pale mess that was his best friend, then flinched as Wanda brushed his hand with hers.

“Babka Dynya sent some supplies,” she told him, “They’re all labeled, and I think there’s instructions too.” And Sam tried – for the sake of his mama’s aunties, working the roots in the Carolinas, he tried to keep the look of disdain off his face, but Wanda’s scowl let him know he probably hadn’t quite managed it. “It’s better than nothing at all, Sam,” she chided.

But thinking about how much of a bitch it had been cleaning literal mud out of a gut wound, Sam did not find himself prepared to agree. “Just watch the road,” he suggested, in lieu of starting a fight.

~* Tony Stark *~

_Mailbox full. Please try again later._

“GOD DAMN IT, STEVE!”

_Call ended_

Russoff hunting lodge, Mt. Wundagore, Transia  
~* Sam Wilson *~

The Quinjet was gone by the time they made it to the hunting lodge. The storm had come on so thick that the only sign of the missing aircraft was a half a foot less snow across the cabin’s access road, where it had been parked. It was almost as if half the team had never been here at all, until the jeep slipped, chugged, and struggled its way up the last curve, and they found the hunting lodge waiting; lights burning warm and bright in the windows, and chimneys volleying a thick smoke apology into the storm.

That probably wasn’t safe, leaving fires burning with nobody inside, but Virginia boy that he was, Sam found gratitude in his ice-rimed, shivering soul for those simple gifts of light and heat.

The door was unlocked too – another blessing disguised as a security failure, because it meant that they could get TO the light and heat without dropping Steve into a snowbank while they searched through blizzard gloom for the keys, or picked the locks with frozen hands.

“Oh, food,” Wanda chattered as they and about half a ton of snow blew across the threshold. “I smell soup!”

And oh yeah, that was definitely the aroma of apology right there – meaty and thick with garlic and pepper. A yeasty sweetness of bread baked sometime that morning hung just underneath it in the air, making Sam’s mouth water, and his belly remind him of how long the day had been, and how Powerbars did not count as proper rations.

But Sam’s hands were full of Super Soldier, and Wanda’s were too. Their coats and boots were dumping snow in watery clumps around them on the tiles, and as attractive as the idea of hot soup and bread sounded, he was not about to drop Steve in the vestibule just so they could go stuff their faces.

“By the fireplace,” he grunted, twisting a chin toward the sunken lounge with its vast, roaring hearth, before which someone had stacked the sofa cushions, bundled in a set of sheets to keep them together. Blankets and pillows were piled nearby, and a basin of water sat warming beside the coals. Yet another gift, and maybe the best one of all; not having to get Steve up the damned stairs to put him in a bed.

“ _Da_ ,” Wanda nodded, still shivering, “Okay.” And together, they hobbled Steve across the foyer, around the furniture in the great room, and rolled him at last onto the makeshift bed. He flopped into place like a doll, all arms and sprawling legs, and only then did the scarlet threads covering his eyes fade away.

And then, her own strings cut, Wanda flopped too, laying claim to the piled blankets and pillows with a long, complicated curse in some language Sam didn’t particularly need to understand in order to heartily agree.

Lacking another pile of bedding though, Sam made it to one of the sprawling armchairs and dumped his medkit off his shoulder before he flopped too. “Let’s never do that again,” he groaned into the air as his back commenced to educate him as to the consequences of his choices.

“Okay,” Wanda murmured, still face down in the bedding, “Which part?”

Sam considered, watching the snow melt off Steve’s hair while he tried and failed to rank the afternoon in order of awfulness. He still hadn’t found a place to start the list when he became aware of his medkit buzzing, over and over against his boot. “The hell?” he wondered, “What’s in this bag?”

“T’s the cat,” Wanda replied.

“Not in my medkit it ain’t,” Sam groaned, tugging himself over to reach the kit’s zippers. “Not unless it had help getting out of the other bag and into this one.”

On the floor, Wanda lurched up out of the bedding with another curse, and scrambled to her feet. “It’s still in the car,” she yelped, and bolted for the door, “The cat’s still in the car!” She slipped twice, flailing and skidding in the melting snow before she flung the front door wide and dove back out into the storm.

Sam spared her a long glance, and considered getting up to push the door closed after her, but as he finally got the kit open he could hear the buzz properly, and knew what it had to be; it was a phone.

More to the point, it was _Steve’s_ phone – the one he carried with him everywhere and didn’t answer questions about when anyone asked him why he had it. The one Sam had never seen him use, aside from making sure it was charged whenever they stopped for the night in a place that had power.

The call had rolled to voice mail by the time Sam found it in a pocket of Steve’s utility belt. ‘59 missed calls’, the crappy little LCD screen informed him, and yeah, snooping was a shitty thing to do and all, but that many calls in a day when the thing had laid silent this long? That had to be a problem. And it wasn’t like none of them knew who had this number, after all. Sam figured he’d rather apologize to Steve for snooping than for letting Tony Stark’s desperate cry for help go unanswered.

Only just then Wanda, still cursing, came back in from the storm with the tattered remains of the carpetbag in her hands. “The cat,” she told him, kicking the door shut at last, “escaped.”

“The cat escaped?” Sam repeated, utterly distracted, “How’d it get out of the jeep?”

“Same way it got out of the bag.” Wanda shrugged, setting the ruined thing aside so she could hang her coat properly on the hook, “The canvas top’s in shreds now. There’s snow all over the seats and floors.”

“Aw man,” Sam sighed, pinching the growing headache at the bridge of his nose, “Scary old lady’s gonna be _pissed_ now.”

A restive movement, and a quietly pathetic groan from the floor drew Sam’s attention to Steve then, who had opened his eyes, and was blinking wetly as he clasped one hand over his bandaged middle. “Sam…?” he murmured, mouth barely moving, as if he meant to sneak the words past a rising gorge, “I don’t feel so good.”

And with that tiny, greenish admission, Sam’s mind leapt from chagrin to action, projecting all the many reasons why throwing up would be a terrible idea for Steve right now – the worst thing he could do, just about. And then Sam’s mind followed it with the cold, hard, clinical knowledge that if Steve was gonna hurl, nothing Sam could do right now would stop it.

He flung the phone aside, dumped a metal dish full of gravel and candles across the coffee table, and then scrambled on his knees to Steve’s side.

“Here,” he said, plunking the bowl on the far side of the cushions, and then wedging his knees under Steve’s side to roll him toward it, “Do what you gotta, man, just go easy, all right? If you can, go easy, cause neither one of us wants me to have to reset those stitches without anesthesia.”

“I’ll get some water,” Wanda called, disappearing into the kitchen as, braced against Sam’s knees, Steve leaned in and began to heave.

~* Avengers HQ, Upstate New York*~  
~* Tony Stark *~

"A micro-tracker," Rhodey said from the doorway. "So you're telling me you coulda GPS'd Cap's happy ass at any time last Spring, and not had us running all over Europe trying to catch up with him and Barnes? Is that what you're telling me?"

"That is not what I'm telling you," Tony yelled back from the depths of the cabinet, still digging with both hands. "They don't work that way. The tracking feature only connects if both wearers activate the function. Like if one of us got kidnapped by aliens or something. Otherwise it only goes off when it's triggered."

He sat back on his heels, blew out a frustrated breath and stared around the supply closet in despair. How many times had he moved his workshop since they'd put the damn chips in? He couldn't even clearly recall whether he’d recovered the signal decryptor from the wreckage Ultron had left of the Manhattan lab or not. "Fuck, please tell me I didn't let the movers throw it away..." he muttered, sliding both hands into his sweaty hair and giving a tug as the chip buzzed and buzzed beneath his skin.

Then Tony heard Rhodey's footsteps coming up close behind him, his paces slower and more careful now that he was walking with a frame, but as steady and determined as always. "So it's like a distress beacon then," Rhodey surmised, his shadow falling long across the jumble of tools and supplies that Tony had been tossing out of his way, "A distress beacon that some qualified rescue agency can pick up and track down to help him out? Or is this some Iron Man Only kind of deal here, because I gotta tell ya Tones, the way you're acting right now makes it seem a little personal."

Tony closed his eyes, lips bitten tight shut as he tried to remember the last time he'd laid hands on the decryptor. At the back of his skull, the chip buzzed, and buzzed, and buzzed again, and then, Rhodey gave a disgusted sigh.

"Dammit, Tony, why did you even sign the Accords?"

"You know why." he answered, and wished for the thousandth time that the encryption code for the damn chips hadn't been one of the casualties of Ultron's murdering JARVIS. FRIDAY was still sulking that she couldn't make heads of tails of the chip's transmission aside from a very vague idea of distance and direction, and Vision didn't seem to be able to perceive the signal at all, let alone translate it. JARVIS had taken the encryption keys to his grave, it seemed.

"Do I?" Rhodey shot back, "Because it seems to me you were concerned about the kind of damage it could cause when people with super powers and armored suits went haring off all over the world without bothering to wait for clearance!"

Tony thrust to his feet and shoved a box of fasteners out of his way so he could sweep a hand over the highest back shelf. "You'd go if it was me," he said, and his voice almost didn't even shake.

"I'd ask for clearance, yes..."

"You'd _go_ ," Tony insisted, turning to glare. "I know for a fact you would, because that's exactly what you DID. Don't tell me the Brass sat back and let a Lieutenant Colonel wander around that Afghanistan hot zone on a three month rescue mission without trying to pull you back into line, because I'm not afraid to call you a liar right to your face."

Rhodey looked down at the finger Tony poked at his shoulder, but he didn't give ground. "Not the same thing," he said, and Tony felt anger squeeze a tight fist around his chest.

"If it was Pepper," he insisted, prodding again, harder, "You'd go if it was her, too. And you wanna know how I know?"

"God damn it, Tony," Rhodey said backing out of reach at last.

Tony took advantage of the movement and stalked back to the ruin he'd made of his workbench. He'd already looked there six times, but he couldn't believe he'd have stashed the remote anywhere less accessible.

"I'm not going in after a bad guy," he said, rifling the pile he'd dumped out of a drawer half an hour ago, when Rhodey had first come to investigate the noise. "I'm not doing a Hydra strike, or blowing up a depot of stolen SI ordnance, I'm just going to help a friend." _If I can find that goddamned decryptor and get to him before he fucking dies!_

Tony kept that part silent.

"A friend." There was something transcendent about the sheer atomic volume of judgment Rhodey managed to hang off the title, and when Tony turned to glare at him for it, he only found the expression that went along with it was just as arid, and just as unimpressed. "That friend who busted your team up, broke an international accord, attacked a US military outpost, and oh yeah, tried to kill you last spring. That's the friend we're talking about here? Because I feel like we need to get that clear."

"No," Tony said, slinging a screwdriver with a bent shaft at the garbage chute across the room. It clanged off key as it went in, clamoring a kind of death rattle all the way down. "Steve didn't..." Tony smoothed his shirt flat, and tried again, voice level, and words precise. "He wasn't trying to kill me."

"Oh, cause disabling your armor and leaving you alone in a Siberian glacier is supposed to be some kind of tough love?"

And maybe if the damned chip hadn't been buzzing, buzzing, buzzing away at the back of Tony's skull, maybe if he'd been able to remember what he'd done with the one damned tool he needed to turn its thin, jangly rattle into data he could fucking work with, or maybe if War Machine hadn't been taking Iron Man's place on the Avengers team when Pepper had decided the two of them needed some time apart to reflect on their priorities, Tony might've been able to shake that judging tone off and let it go.

Alas.

"Look," he snarled, his hands shaking into knotted fists as he rounded on his friend, "I might have been a little drunk at the time, but I distinctly remember _you_ doing something not too different at a certain birthday party I threw not so long ago. And no," he swept the inevitable protest aside with a vicious slash of his hand, "I realize that Malibu isn't Siberia, but FRIDAY knew exactly where I was when she lost signal, and she had help already on the way to me. And... and the point is, Cap wasn't trying to kill me any more than you were back in 2010. He just..." Tony took a breath, forcing his chest to expand around the air, to hold it for a second before he let the truth of that day slip out into the open.

"He just wanted to _stop_ me," he said, turning to face Rhodey square on, "Only I was too fucking pissed off crazy to realize it at the time. Steve wanted to stop me in Siberia for the same reason you wanted to stop me back in Malibu; because you're both my friends, and neither of you wanted to stand back and do nothing while you watched me fuck up my damn life!"

"Tony," Rhodey tried again, anger softening into something too much like contrition. Tony turned away from those eyes and the gentle pity they carried. The painful truth had been clawing at his throat since March, and Tony couldn't watch his friend's face change as it found its way to the light at last.

"I would have killed him, Rhodey," he said, scanning the open tool chest, the welding table, the 3D print stand, the hoist tackle... "I was ready to. I wanted to kill Barnes where he stood. And Barnes, he _would have_ stood there and let me do it if Steve hadn't got between us. And then..." he spread his hands out wide, and stole a glance at Rhodey's face. "I'd have been a murderer. And out of every shitty damned thing I've ever done to earn my Merchant of Death title, cold blooded murder is a line I have never crossed." He slashed his hand through the air between them. 

Rhodey’s eyes didn't follow it though, didn’t so much flicker away from Tony’s face.

Tony found he had to look away again. "And because of what Steve did in Siberia, I still get to say that,” he finished at last, “And now the _friend_ who gave me that gift might be hurt. Or he might be dead. Or he might just be fucking lonely, but I owe him."

In the weighty silence that followed, Tony felt sure Rhodey had to be able to hear the maddening buzz too, but if he did, he didn't mention it. "You never told me that. That you were trying to kill Barnes."

Tony sighed, and looked at the ceiling. "Turns out there's a lot of stuff I haven't told you, Pop-Rocks. Mostly stuff I'm not fucking proud of."

The walker frame rustled, metal brushing cloth as Rhodey huffed a sigh and made his way over to the sofa. "Yeah, that's not new. So you really think you'd have killed Barnes if Rogers hadn't stopped you?" he asked, bending to drag a tarpaulin out of his way so he could sit. "You really think you're that guy?"

Tony could only shake his head. "If you'd asked me before Siberia, I'd have told you no, never. I've never killed anybody who wasn't trying to kill me first..." and there, as usual, the ghost of Charlie Spencer made him wince, "-- not deliberately, face to face, I mean. Convincing cases have been made about my culpability for SI Ordnance, that-"

"Tones," Rhodey cut him off, "You're not. You're not a murderer. Not like that."

And there, Tony had to laugh just a little. "Well, thanks to Steve, I never had to find out for sure. But I still have to go to him, Rhodey." He scrubbed a hand through his hair and tried to flex some of the tension out of his neck. That only made the chip buzz louder, an idiot tune in the key of despair. "I _have_ to."

"Okay, say I see your point," Rhodey allowed, "Why can't you give the GPS to the coast guard or emergency services of whatever country he's pinging you from, and tell them to go pick him up? Or Viz? He could track it and pull Cap out of whatever hot water he’s in without even pinging the radar, I bet."

Aaand there went the anger again, bristling Tony’s neck with such helpless frustration that he knotted both fists into his hair just to anchor himself down against the urge to scream.

"Because I can't find the tool I need to unscramble the damned signal!" he ground out, turning in place to glare around his workshop again. "If I could find the goddamned remote, I'd know exactly what the chip was picking up, and where to find him! But without the reader, it's just an international game of Marco Polo, and I'm the only one who can hear him, so I’d have to go along with whoever did the extraction anyway!” 

He gave in to the urge to pace, hands still clenched, scalp still aching. “And I could maybe make another reader if I took an afternoon to start from square one on it, and I could definitely crack my own encryption with oh, say, another day, or maybe two if I was especially drunk when I wrote the code to begin with, which I honestly don’t remember, because I can’t fucking _think_ with this thing _buzzing at me_ like this, but I have no way to guess whether Steve's even GOT that kind of time right now because-"

"Okay Tony, okay," Rhodey reached out, caught at Tony’s elbow as he passed, "Maybe you need to calm down and tell me how this thing gets triggered."

Tony let himself be stopped, leaning a little helplessly into the weight of Rhodey’s grip. "Life signs crash," he said, Then he dropped his hands, watched the blood rush back into the clench-whitened fingers, and took a mental step back from the worst-case scenario. "Or. I guess any strong deviation from normal active parameters. Arrhythmia, hypothermia, hyperthermia, extreme drop in blood volume, hypoxia, seizure, embolism, aneurysm, critical dehydration… Chum crate!"

Rhodey’s hand dropped away. “Do what now?”

But Tony was already scrambling toward the fabrication room, and the big box full of half-fried but still potentially useful components he could never make himself just throw out. Busted stereos, cameras, drones, phones, and other toys that weren't good for much but salvaged parts for other, better things.

“Chum crate!” he called as the door hissed out of his way. Then, “Lunch! Sometime. Later, not now. Let’s do it! Sorrybye!”


	3. Threshold Negotiations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hard knocks meet hard questions, and billionaire effluvia is not officially an American collectible.

~* Royal Palace, Birnin Zana, Wakanda *~  
~* Natasha Romanoff *~

Some time later, Natasha awoke to the certainty that someone was watching her.

She considered her options with lightning efficiency; unknown location, trauma-ache in her lower belly, tight with bruise and bandages; weapons missing, clothing… very different from what she’d been wearing when she’d gone to sleep… or passed out over dinner, if one was going to be technical about it.

So. Not optimal fighting conditions, but she’d faced worse in the Red Room.

She’d just decided it was worth the risk to flutter an eyelid and gain some more situational data when a young, and half-familiar voice called out from some distance away. “Ah good, you’re awake. Tell me, Widow, why did you have four boxes of Tony Stark’s vomit in your jet?”

And just like that, Natasha’s battle-readiness evaporated completely. “What?” she asked, sitting up on the table and peering at the Princess, who was perched next to a selection of metal crates with very conspicuous labels. “Oh,” she sighed, understanding, “That’s the BARF.”

The Princess cut her an unimpressed look. “Yes, that’s what it says on the labels, and it does not make me want to open them _at all_. But you still haven’t explained why.”

“No, I mean that’s…” Natasha sighed and rubbed at her eyes with both hands. “Where’d Clint go?” God, it had been a long time since she’d sounded that pathetic.

“He’s with my brother,” Shuri replied, hopping off her stool and circling the boxes. “They are planning the press coverage and PR for his repatriation or something. There are fan clubs and lawyers involved, that’s all I know about it. So is it exclusively Stark’s barf you have in here, or are there other billionaires’ effluvia in the boxes too?”

“It’s really not-”

“I thought there would be some kind of refrigeration though. Unless it’s just bottles inside?” Shuri wrinkled her nose in fetching disgust. “I have seen a lot of your strange American fetishes online, but this one? Billionaire barf?” she shook her head. “Deeply weird.”

“I’m not American,” Natasha hastened to assure her, revolted in principle.

“Well it’s even stranger for Russians if you ask me, but I try not to judge.”

“No, that’s…” Natasha slid off the table and crossed the room, a little surprised to find that her lower belly only hurt a little once she got moving. “Look, let me just open them, and show you what-”

“Ugh!” the girl yelped, skittering backward as Natasha reached for the clasps of the nearest box. “Will it spill? Do I need to set up a containment field? I just finished cleaning up your blood, and I do not want to have to decontaminate my lab twice in one day.”

“My blood?” Natasha said, before registering that her injury felt weeks old, and well into healing instead of the next-night misery she’d expected. She pulled up the soft black caftan and examined the white expanse of her belly in surprise. Another scar, and a tapestry of brilliant bruising, but for all intents and purposes… “I’m healed?”

“Well I didn’t think it polite to just let you bleed all over the floor after you passed out at dinner,” the girl replied with an arch smirk. “Avengers notwithstanding, we Wakandans prefer people to keep their blood inside themselves in polite company. But that still doesn’t explain the Barf,” she added, dismissing Natasha’s gratitude unspoken.

“Here,” Natasha said, flipping the crate’s clasp. “This is Tony Stark’s BARF.”

“Oh, this is so not sanitary!” Shuri squeaked in appalled delight. Then, when the front of the crate dropped away to reveal the projectors and cameras in their nests of foam, she huffed in disappointment. “Oh. It’s... equipment?”

“Binarily Augmented Retro-Framing,” Natasha supplied, picking the smallest case out of its socket and taking the glasses from it with careful hands. “B.A.R.F. So named because Mr. Stark’s inner 12 year old is apparently never far from the surface.”

“Most men are that way, it seems,” Shuri nodded sagely. “I can guess what it does if I look at a few more components, or you could just tell me…?”

“Near as I can tell, it’s meant to be in-depth trauma therapy with no human intimacy requirement.” She shrugged. “I don’t know the specifics of the neural science involved, but I do know that part of Stark’s intention behind the design was to be able to address personal trauma without the need to talk to an actual therapist about anything. Ever.” She let the moue of distaste quirk up into a smile. “Again, like most men.”

The Princess snickered, but then her expression turned canny. “But that does not explain why he let you bring it here. My brother said you and Mr. Stark did not part ways on the best of terms.”

And to that, Natasha could only shrug. “It’s not the first time, probably won’t be the last. Stark’s trust issues blow up in the faces of the people who care about him all the time. We’re all used to working around that by now.”

“I see. So he _did not_ actually give you permission to bring his barf to Wakanda, did he?” Shuri’s glee leaked freely from beneath her attempt at a stern expression.

“Insofar as he didn’t make much of an effort to _prevent_ me taking it,” Natasha replied, unrepentant. “The system was crated up for transport, right next to Lang’s suit, Hawkeye’s bow, and the Falcon EXO, after all.” 

And it had all been all under such a scant afterthought of security that Natasha had been half convinced it was a trap. Until she remembered that Stark had mentioned the system by name when Natasha had explained to him what must have happened to Barnes in the Berlin containment facility. Then she had realized that the vault and its contents were a gilt-edged, engraved invitation; providing plausible deniability to Stark’s tyrannical handler, while still ensuring that their teammates could carry on saving the world, and providing a way that the time bomb in a dangerous man’s mind might possibly be defused before anyone else had to die.

“You think he wanted you to steal it?” Shuri asked, not as skeptical as she had been a moment before.

Natasha grinned. “That’s Stark’s way. Remind me to tell you how Colonel Rhodes got the War Machine suit sometime. The story involves far too much alcohol, heavy metal poisoning, and two grown men destroying a million-dollar house full of innocent people because they couldn’t manage an honest, rational conversation between them.”

The Princess blinked. “Wow. You’ve pretty much described all of Wakanda last month...”

Then it was Natasha’s turn to blink. “What? Did something-”

“So this book you brought me then;” Shuri asked, subtle as a brick through a window as she turned to her workstation and summoned up projected scans of the Red Book’s pages. “I have not begun to work on the cypher, but from the diagrams, I assume it contains procedural notes as well as control data?”

“That’s what I’ve heard.” Natasha let the diversion stand, for now, and helped herself to a seat. “I can help with some of the encryption, and I should be able to point out the pages that are most relevant to our particular project, so -”

“So that there will be no need to translate it all before I can burn the awful thing?” Shuri nodded, dark eyes flashing. “Good. My brother wants any data pertaining to HYDRA’s access codes and ciphers, but we are _not_ going to provide the world with instructions for the atrocities that were done to poor Sergeant Barnes.”

And for a moment, Natasha considered genies and bottles, and how very hard it can be to make unknown a force which has already evolved a form, but then she nodded her agreement. With one caveat.

“Stark’s going to need to see what we get from it,” she said, eyes scanning the projected pages warily, not quite as sure as she wanted to be that she was, herself, not still carrying triggers listed within that bloodied book. “He can be trusted with the information, be sure, but before the whole thing’s destroyed, he’s going to need to lay eyes on it at least once. So he can be sure.”

“You think he still blames Barnes? Even after all that Zemo confessed?” Shuri sounded surprised, and for a moment, Natasha weathered a rush of fond protectiveness for the girl’s innocence.

“I think, if he never sees this with his own eyes, a part of him will always wonder,” Natasha replied. “And that doubt is the blind spot that could kill him one day, if it’s allowed to fester. Besides,” she smirked, “Tony’s letting us use his BARF. It’s only fair we give him the benefit of HYDRA’s slimy old ichor in trade, don’t you think?”

~* Russoff hunting lodge, Mt. Wundagore, Transia *~  
~* Tony Stark *~

It was a fact both awful and amazing that from the air, and at sufficient altitude and velocity, a country at its own throat could look this utterly benign. Bucolic and pastoral in the rural areas, with a hazy glow over the larger towns that could stand in for industry and electrics if you couldn’t smell the smoke. Fly high enough, and all you’d see was trees, mist, and snow.

Unless your AI was feeding you all the appalling details over your HUD as you went, of course. Then you’d see the chemical ghosts of explosions past in the rocky hollows where villages should have been; the radiation signature of depleted uranium rounds scattered like army-sized breadcrumbs along the mountain roads; a detailed tapestry of deeply personal carnage in the growing flocks of crows, and mobs of foxes making bold with the daylight leftovers beneath the sky.

There were bigger animals in the woods too, their heat signatures a sulfurous shine through the trees as they helped themselves, singly or in bunches, to what carrion could be dragged into something like cover. Come nightfall, Tony suspected, they’d be less shy about things.

“How’s that signal, FRIDAY?” he asked, an eye-flick banishing the IR scan before the detail could resolve too much, “Still stable?”

“He’s still not moving, Boss,” she affirmed. “The Captain’s signal is farther north. Higher on the mountain.”

“You can’t get a better lock on it than that?” he grumbled, but even as the words left his mouth, Tony spotted a single thread of smoke rising through the trees. The HUD focused, zoomed, refocused, and for all the rising smoke Tony had seen in his flight over Transia that day, this one was different. “What’s up there on that ridge?” he asked, already angling his flight toward the unspooling plume.

“I don’t have a satellite aspect for a live photo, but Google Earth has photos of those coordinates blurred, Boss.” 

Because of course they did. Governments blurred out patches of their territory from satellite images for reasons of national security all the world over. And it might as well have been a Newtonian law that if the Government didn’t want people looking someplace, and you needed to find Steve Rogers anywhere nearby, that blurred patch would definitely be where you’d find him.

“All right,” he said. “Stealth measures still engaged?” The HUD lit up in affirmation. “Good. Let’s get above it then. Give me scans as we get close, too, so I know what I’m walking into.”

~* Sam Wilson *~

Steve was passed out when Sam came back in from his turn at chopping wood. After 24 hours of fever spikes, nightmares, and dry heaves every time one of them got near him with food, Sam figured he deserved whatever he could snatch of oblivion. Frankly, they all did.

Also, it made things like chopping enough wood to keep the enormous fireplace lit up and melting pots of snow for drinking water easier, because they didn’t have to keep on settling the big idiot back into his nest with assurances that they didn’t need him to take his turn yet, and would he please, for once in his life, just stay down? Not that that conversation had happened four times since they’d arrived or anything.

Between the two of them, Sam and Wanda had been making only limited progress figuring out the Lodge’s utilities. The furnace burned oil, and it had a full tank, but the lodge’s thermostats were all electric, as was the ignition on the stove and water heater. And after a short in the system had shut it all down the first night, neither of them could figure out how to get the generator up and running again. Or if it was even safe to try doing so.

There were fireplaces in most of the rooms, and enough candles and lamps to get them by for another few days if they were sparing, but the water pump was electric too, so having enough water on hand for drinking, cooking, washing, and bucket-flushing the toilets was another big drain on the wood supply the others had left for them.

Hence Wanda taking her turn out in the still-falling snow now; cutting big logs down to fireplace size while Sam recovered from his own turn, sprawled on the thick, shaggy rug beside the baking hearthstones, and waiting for his fingers to thaw. He wondered, idly, whether he would rather pacify his grumbling belly with yet another helping of re-warmed soup, or try to cook something fresh in the fireplace and hope the pans could hold up to an open fire. Place like this ought to have cast iron, but Sam hadn’t exactly taken time to go searching the cupboards yet.

“Still better than Afghanistan,” he promised himself quietly, staring up at the golden wood of the great room’s vaulted ceiling, deep-shadowed but still warm in the twilight. “Still ass-cold at night, sure, but at least heat ain’t tryn’a kill me all day too. And the sand...” Sam grimaced, running one hand over the plush fur hearth rug and remembering one particularly windy desert night when he’d realized he’d forgotten what it felt like to be really, fully clean.

“We got shelter,” he said, wincing as his warming fingers informed him in the least comfortable way possible that their frostbite was only minor, and his nerves were coming back online just fine. “We got supplies, we got backup coming any day now, and you, my man,” he reached out and patted Steve’s lax hand before checking his pulse again – strong and steady, though faster than it should have been, considering. Still, Sam would take it over many alternatives. “You have that serum keeping your happy ass alive until we can get you someplace with actual modern hospital facilities. Good job, Serum. You keep on doing that.”

Steve’s breathing didn’t shift at Sam’s handling – further proof of just how exhausted this fever had gotten him. Sam was just tucking his lax hand back under the blankets when an unearthly, wavering, fluting howl from behind him set the hairs on his neck prickling with horrified alarm. 

No human sound this; no animal or bird that he could name, but Sam’s nightmare brain summoned up every Lovecraft story he’d ever heard of as the windows rattled, the roof-trusses groaned, and a blast of wind, icy and scarlet, came roaring _down_ the chimney to crush the fire utterly dead.

“Wanda?!” Sam yelled, lurching to shelter Steve as firescreen toppled in a billow of ash and cinders. 

It had been fine when he’d been outside before – calm, even, after the storm that had pinned them down for nearly two days, but now all the windows were blank-faced white again. In the tiny bit of twilight that made it through them, Sam could just barely find the table where he’d set his guns down a minute before. 

Then the room blazed suddenly to light, every bulb in every socket flaring white for a blinding second before bursting like a string of Chinese Firecrackers. “WANDA?!” Sam bellowed again, on his feet now, but too flash-blind to even try making it to the door.

The wind roared again, swirling through the house with a gust of ash and flying snow until the front door slammed, and Wanda’s voice pricked the darkness with fear. “Quiet! Be quiet. I’m trying to hide us!” she panted, the red pulse of her powers the only light left in the whole vast space. “If he can’t see the heat, if the snow looks undisturbed, he might just pass by...”

“Wanda, you can’t fool IR cameras like that unless you flash-freeze this whole place. And as for the snow, you’ve got a localized blizzard going out there,” Sam pulled his ‘calming intervention voice’ out from under the adrenaline rush as he went to her side. “That’s kind of an attention getter. So let’s back it off, take a breath, and tell me why aren’t we going for,” he tapped at his temple, “- a more direct interface on this?”

“I can’t,” she gulped as the roaring wind slowed outside, and the snow began to settle to the ground again, “Not with him. Not ever again.”

Which, coupled with the unmistakable sound of repulsors dopplering over the lodge roof, gave Sam all the information he needed – but hadn’t really wanted – to know.

~* Steve Rogers *~

It was the cold that shook him awake – sudden and gritty, and looming with a sense of dread seventy years deep. Steve could no more have dozed through that brutal, icy clutch than he could have willingly taken a knee before the Red Skull.

The cold roused him to fight it, and the sound of voices, hot and loud nearby, pried loose the last gripping finger sleep had on him. Especially when _that_ voice, his dreaming mind was certain, belonged to Tony Stark.

“Damn it Wilson, I did not come here to fight!” the shout echoed, and was strangely muffled at the same time. Steve turned toward it, blinking crusty eyes in vain. He was inside someplace, on the floor, surrounded by furniture, and the fight was going on outside. He was also not wearing anything. At all.

“Oh naw, of course you didn’t,” Sam came back, all salt, “You came as a friend, right? Cause I ain’t never heard _that_ out of you before or anything.”

Steve caught his breath – carefully, carefully – and rolled to his side, one hand pressed flat to the floor as he gathered his knees up to take his weight, the other dragging the bedclothes around him as he went.

“That’s not fair,” Tony said, and his voice was angry but somehow also resigned, as if he thought on some level he probably did have it coming after all, “I didn’t know when-”

“No,” Sam cut him off, “No, it wasn’t fair at all, but I still helped you find him, even after you shot me down cold and fed me to your wolves, I helped you!”

Steve grabbed for the nearest chair, one arm wrapping the blanket tight around the dreadful numbness at his belly as he pulled himself to his feet.

“Hey, you made a choice-”

“Yeah, I did. And what I’ve seen since then hasn’t changed my mind about it!” Steve could see Sam’s back through one of the side light windows, Wanda’s through the other. The big front door might as well have been barricaded behind a pile of boulders. “But you made a choice or two yourself, Stark,” Sam went on as Steve spotted himself carefully along the furniture to reach the support of the wall, shuffling slow so the blanket wouldn’t trip him up. “And I don’t know what you did to him in Siberia, but Steve is _not_ up for another round of it now!”

_Nuts,_ Steve thought, opening his mouth to try and call the fight off before the escalation Tony would almost certainly sling back. But the sound that left his lips was closer to a wheeze than a warning. His jaw felt loose and bound up tight at the same time, and the threatening cramp of shallow, shifting muscles inside him made trying for more volume seem like a bad idea.

“What I…?” Tony answered, just as outraged as Steve had expected. “Unbe _liev_ able! Look, you know that you can’t actually stop me from going in there,” he said, and despite the charging whine of repulsors, the threat sounded more like a plea. “You know that, right?”

And Sam, damn and bless him, only squared up and raised his chin to the blue-white glow. “I know it. That don’t mean I’m gonna step aside though. You want him, you got to actually get the blood on you, and I wanna see if you can look me in the eye when you shoot me down this time.”

And there, Steve realized, there was some more unfinished business talking. Something Sam and Natasha had both hinted at after the escape from the Raft, but never spoken of plainly. He pushed along the wall; half slide, half well-managed fall, dragging the bedding like a bride’s train behind him until he could get a trembling hand onto the doorknob. Which was locked. Of course.

“That’s not going to happen,” Tony said after a long moment, and the repulsor whine died to silence. “That’s not why I came here. None of this is why I came, damn it! Why can’t you believe me?”

“Because _he_ cannot read your mind,” Wanda spoke up at last, voice wary and pitying at once. “You need to know that Steve is alive, so we are telling you; Steve is alive. We will not let him die here. You do not need to stay.”

Steve groaned to himself. It was like they didn’t know Tony Stark at _all_! He hurried to draw the bolt – a tricky thing to manage one-handed when he didn’t quite feel ready to take his weight off the doorknob. Then a silky, insistent brush of weight against his leg shocked the silent despair right out of him.

Little Brother peered out of Steve’s blanket wrap like an Indian scout from a teepee, his tail coiled around Steve’s left leg with an impatient twitch as he glared up at the sound of Steve’s half-strangled yelp, and gave a chirping sort of mew.

Steve closed his eyes on a curse, willing his thrashing heart to calm, willing his twitching hands to still. Then he shifted his balance, trying to nudge the cat away from his bare and vulnerable feet. Little Brother was having none though, and only leaned in harder, thudded his tail against Steve’s knee, and demanded, “Ouuuuut.”

On the other side of the door, Tony wasn’t sounding any more patient himself. “So you’re telling me Steve’s hurt,” he said in his fight-picking voice, “it’s bad enough that he can’t tell me himself that he’s okay, and you think I’m going to just go away and _leave_ him here? In the middle of nowhere?”

“No,” Steve muttered to the cat, shifting his weight to kick the blankets away from the door – and maybe, completely by accident, kicking the cat just a little harder too, “You’re in the way.”

Little Brother flashed him a glare, and then backed directly onto Steve’s cold-numbed foot, claws prickling with clear menace. “Ouuuut!” he insisted, radiant with menace now.

“That’s the choice you made when you signed the Accords,” Wanda said, calm and chilly.

“And when you put us in that prison for _not_ signing them,” added Sam.

“Okay, you know what though? It’s not about you right now!” Tony said, in that strained, polite tone Steve knew was about two breaths away from shouting. “And it’s not about me, and it’s not about the Accords either!”

“Naaaaaaoooowww!” Little Brother stood up against the door, stretching for the doorknob as if he meant to open it himself.

“Well now you’re b-blocking it,” Steve hissed back, tugging in vain on the door, which did not seem the least bit inclined to open. “Ge-et outtathe way!”

“It’s about Steve Rogers nearly _dying_ two days ago!” Tony’s ire came on like an avalanche, words coming louder, faster, angrier as he went on, “And the whole damned postage stamp of a country trying to blow itself up, and the UN’s about two days from sending in troops here, only instead of getting him somewhere with actual medical facilities, you two insist on playing cabin in the woo-”

“Ow!” Steve yelped when Little Brother leapt and grabbed for the doorknob, clawing both Steve’s foot, and his gripping hand. “Damn it, will you just go away?”

The silence beyond the door was sudden and deafening. Then Tony’s voice broke it, half strangled with hope. “Steve?”

“I can’t-” Steve shivered, clutched his middle tighter, and yanked on the door again as Little Brother dropped to the floor, arched up and ears back. “The da-a-mn d-door won’t-”

Then suddenly, the damn door would, and did. 

Steve lurched into the gap as it flung wide to his pull, and if Sam hadn’t lunged to catch him, he would have gone right over onto the cat.

“Man, what the hell are you doing out of bed?” Sam grumbled, working a shoulder under Steve’s arm and hauling him upright. “I told you to stay down!”

_I heard you shouting,_ he meant to say, and _What happened to the fires?_ and _Just let me handle this, Sam,_ and _Tony, it’s okay. I’ll be fine, I promise. You don’t have to look so scared..._ But what came out of his mouth was a groan, diced fine between chattering teeth, “Cccccoldddd...”

Guilt flashed across Wanda’s face, and she turned, catching the blankets to tug them up over his bare shoulders. “We’ll get you inside,” she said, “Stark?”

“Let me carry him,” Tony said, reaching with armored hands, only to stop short at a loud, inhuman scream. Because of course the fucking cat had put itself between them; ears back, arched up high, and puffed to three times its normal size, as though Little Brother fully intended to make sure Iron Man did not get even half a chance to make off with Steve. 

“Whoa there, Cujo!” Tony said, hands still out, but no longer reaching as the cat coiled down in the deep snow and ranged the jump it would take to reach Tony’s exposed face.

“Ffffuckoff, you...” Steve said to the cat, “little… ass… hole!” He leaned out, shaking hand stretched for Tony’s, and hoping that would be permission enough for his overprotective friends to back down and relax.

But of course Little Brother hadn’t ever considered Steve a friend, had he? The cat bounded upward, hit Tony’s armor at the waist, and then, claws catching purchase at the seams, he literally ran the rest of the way up the suit.

“No!” Steve yelped, lunging, or trying to. Sam cursed, staggering them both in the icy drifts, and Wanda cried something in Sokovian, lashing scarlet threads of her power toward them as Iron Man and Little Brother both went crashing over backwards.

But Steve didn’t see them hit.

It was a long, white while before Steve saw anything at all.

~*~

Reality came back in murmurs, hushed, tense, and nonsensical, and in random drifts of color that spread like watercolor over new-page blankness. They always faded though, before Steve could make sense out of them.

 _What happened?_ he wanted to ask. _Where are my hands? Why can’t I feel my face? Where did Sam go? Is Tony all right?_ But there was no one to ask. No answers he could understand, just a feeling of shattered exhaustion, and a sense of his whole self being somehow different, somehow wrong.

_“How do you feel?”_ asked a ghost from seventy five years away.

“Tall...er,” Steve breathed, the word thick as tar and tasting of metal in his mouth.

Then something cool and soft brushed across his eyes, and a closer, red-brown voice murmured, “Hush now. Don’t try to talk. Your tongue’s still healing.”

He blinked, found Wanda’s face above his, softly candle-lit and doing her best to hide appalled alarm behind a thin smile and a veneer of confidence. “Wha-” Her fingers brushed his lips closed far easier than he thought they should have been able to do.

“Shh,” she said. “You bit it when… when you fell. But the serum seems to be handling it. Can you rest now, or do you need me to...” Her hand raised, fingers crooked in an offer of oblivion that made Steve shudder away in a full-body flinch that knocked the pillow right off the bed.

“Nnnuh,” he grunted, giving a hard head shake that left him a little dizzy afterward. Wanda gave him a reproachful glare, but bent to retrieve it without further complaint. The smell of wood smoke occurred to him then, and the weight of blankets warm and solid over his body, mattress and smooth sheets beneath him. Night hunched low and blue in the close corners of the room.

He could hear Sam and Tony in the hallway, he realized, still wrangling in low, tense voices, as if neither of them quite knew how to talk without the anger strung between them. Not that he knew what _that_ was like or anything.

“...erstand why you can’t,” Sam was saying, “What if he seizes like that again while you’ve got him in the air? Took all three of us just to get him up the damn stairs as it was.”

“You think he-” Tony bit off whatever it was he’d been going to say, and started again, on a new tack. “What if I carry him across the front of the suit? We can rig some kind of a sling and-”

“Hey, para-rescue experience here,” Sam cut in, “And no. A patient seizing in a hanging sling of any kind is a recipe for strangulation and broken limbs, even without super soldier strength. If he didn’t rip right out of whatever you were carrying him in, he’d drag the both of you straight into a crash while you were trying to control him.”

“Seiz...ure?” Steve murmured as Wanda lifted his head to tuck the pillow back under it. Her eyes glimmered in the candle’s glow.

“Just rest,” she insisted, cutting a worried glance at the door as she straightened, “Please, Steve.”

So we just… what, we just stay here and wait to see if he’s gonna do that again?” Tony asked outside the door, strain creaking in the question’s edges. “Seizures can kill people, right?”

“Not Steve,” Sam’s voice was like a slamming door, determined and defiant. “We’ll get him out when Romanoff comes back with the jet, and his serum will keep him steady till then.”

The laugh Tony gave then was nervy, shrill, and furious. “The _serum_ should have healed all that by now, shouldn’t it! I mean he bounced out of that hospital in DC after what, three days? He still looks like raw meat in there!”

Wanda stood, muttered something under her breath as she grabbed the candle and turned for the door, but apparently Sam was closer, and just as ready to snap.

“Pull it up, Stark,” he said, voice low with warning, “Pull it up, because this ain’t helping anything. Steve’s already fighting whatever this infection is with all his strength. He does not need to be doing your emotional heavy lifting too, even though we all know he’ll try if he hears you talking like this. So you need to pull it up and glue it together, or else go home and let us handle this.”

Steve would have rolled his eyes if he could. Sam couldn’t have waved a bigger, brighter red flag into the face of Tony’s stubbornness if he _had_ worked alongside him for the year after Ultron. And sure enough, the bright defiance had Tony’s eyes lit up like a foundry in full blaze when Wanda opened the bedroom door and Steve glimpsed him through it.

“Okay,” Tony said, hands flexing, empty and unarmored at his side. “Fine. She’s got three days. Then I’m going back for a Quinjet myself, and I’m getting all of you out, do you hear me?” And suddenly, those eyes were fixed on Steve’s face, furious with promise. “I am getting you out!”

And the best Steve could manage as a reply before the door closed was a smile. It must have been enough though, because next came the unmistakable sound of Tony rubbing at his face with his hands, as if he were pushing the lid back down onto his temper. And then he said, “Okay. So until then, what _can_ I do to help?”

“Um...” Wanda’s voice replied, strangely shy, “The generator won’t start, and… we’re, um, out of lightbulbs?”

~* Royal Palace, Birnin Zana, Wakanda *~  
~* Bucky Barnes *~

The oblivion drained away in a rush, light and sound swirling into his awareness first, warmth and weight following quickly after. And then he was awake, and nothing at all was as it ought to have been.

Lying still on the smooth, yielding surface beneath him, Bucky blinked and took a quick, careful scan of his surroundings. Then he asked, “Where am I?”

The techs behind the red headed woman exchanged worried looks, then checked their tablets. But the woman herself didn’t blink at the question. “Where do you think you are?” she asked.

Sitting up in the hospital cot, Bucky took stock of his body; his arm was gone, (His arm! Was gone!) The stump that remained was covered in a smooth black sock, and the absence of the familiar, dragging weight almost made his spine ache just sitting there. He wasn’t shaking; wasn’t drenched with sweat; the light didn’t seem to be boring straight through his skull and his thoughts weren’t wheeling and shrieking like birds, so he didn’t think he’d been drugged. He had no new injuries that he could tell (his arm! Was fucking! Gone!) and it sure as hell looked like he’d woken up in the same place he’d gone to sleep.

All of which would have been unsettlingly unusual, even without critical detail they’d gotten dead wrong.

“Where’s Steve?” he asked, swinging his bare feet to the floor.

“He’s busy,” The redhead lied with an easy smile. “He wanted to come, couldn’t get away.” She waved the pair of techs forward with a smile none of them found reassuring. “If you’re ready, they need to check your motor function so we can make sure you’re ready for the next-”

“Where am I really?” he cut her off with a growl, and the techs abruptly thought better of their exam. She turned around, all eyebrow at his challenge, and he huffed a laugh he really didn’t feel at all. “Last I saw, you were shooting at the Prince of Wakanda, after trying to help Iron Man throw us all in jail. Now here you come, telling me T’Challa’d let you be here to wake me out of Cryo if Steve couldn’t be?” He gave the fiction a derisive snort and stood, loudly cracking his neck with a tilt of his head. “I’d expect a better lie out of a Widow.”

And there, surprisingly, she did smile. “So you do remember me?” She purred as the techs both remembered something else they needed to be doing far away, and left without a word.

“I remember a lot of things,” he agreed, and chose not to mention how few of those things added up to anything resembling sense where she, personally, was concerned. “Now should I bother asking you again, or do you just want to go?”

Her smile deepened just a hair, a tiny, violent delight curling in one corner. Her eyes calculated her odds with a glitter of too-familiar green, and Bucky found himself rising to it despite himself, with a smile of his own. She was a Widow – on that detail Bucky’s memory was unshaken. She’d been trained to fight dirty, to fight mean, and to win at any cost, and Bucky didn’t know for _certain_ that he could take her one-handed as he could have with two... but he was becoming aware of a deeply angry part of him that was game to give it a try.

Then a light flashed up between them from one of the tech’s abandoned tablets, and resolved itself into the glimmering blue projection of a Prince.

“Ms. Romanoff, Sergeant Barnes,” T’Challa said with grave amusement, “My sister urgently requests that you refrain from destroying her laboratory, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“Bucky,” he corrected, rude and not caring one tiny bit about it. “And I ain’t worried about trouble. I got more than plenty to go around if you people keep giving me monkeyshine every time I ask about Steve.”

“Monkeyshine?” Romanoff teased, but T’Challa at least was willing to forego the games.

“Captain Rogers’ absence today was unavoidable. His injuries made it impossible for him to travel, and-”

“What injuries?” Bucky demanded, still not believing it. Because injuries didn’t keep Steve down! They never had, even when he was a hundred pounds wringing wet! And once that serum had got hold of him….

Bucky scraped his hand through his hair, gripping it tight to quell the rising urge to just start punching things. “What happened to Steve? If he was hurt, why the hell isn’t he here?” Hairs tore as he slashed a sweeping gesture at the room, gleaming and flashing with medical technology he couldn’t begin to understand. If Steve needed help that his serum couldn’t provide, then why the hell should he be anywhere else in the world right now?

“We couldn’t evac-” Romanoff began, then flinched back a step when Bucky whirled on her.

“YOU LEFT HIM?!”

“Yes! Because that was _his_ plan!” she hissed back, as if that was any kind of excuse.

“I have been told,” the transparent Prince – or maybe it was King now – spoke up hastily, “that the Captain insisted that the transport take place on schedule despite his injuries.” Bucky closed his eyes, trying not to picture it. “The mission objective was, I believe, quite important to him.”

Mission objective. Like any fucking mission’s objective mattered if Steve went down under its wheels! He was tougher than that, his plans were better, and he didn’t split the team on evac unless he had no fucking choice... Bucky sucked humid air and remembered horror through the clench of his teeth. “Was it Stark?” he asked. “Did he come gunning for Steve, or did Steve go and-”

“нет!”

That word, that language, was like a dash of ice down his spine, and from the careful look in Romanoff’s face when he turned on her, she’d planned on the effect. “Not Stark,” she promised gravely, speaking plain for the first time since Bucky had awoken. “He had nothing to do with it.”

“Nothing. To do. With _what_?”

“With this,” Romanoff gritted back, yanking open a drawer behind her, and flinging something at his head. Something large, flat, and red. Something that spun like a square shield until the wind of its passage fanned it open to flutter like a moth. 

Bucky stepped aside without trying to catch it – he’d have had to touch it for that, and quite frankly he’d have sooner been lit on fire. The red book spun to a stop on the polished floor, black star glaring up at him from its worn cover like a threat, like a promise, like a thousand sins he would never escape.

“That’s what we went to get,” she said, shoving a chair Bucky’s way when he ran out of space to back away from the thing. “Zemo’s plans required a lot of capital; bribe money, transit fees, fake IDs, black market explosives. None of that’s cheap, and he was out of a job, so he sold the book to raise some of that cash. We thought it was a bad idea to leave that kind of information out there, so we went and we got it back. And now Princess Shuri is going to use it, and these,” she snatched up a pair of ugly glasses from the same desk, and brandished them like a flag, “to get those trigger words out of your brain, and _then_ , assuming you’re safe to be let out in public, and you ask nicely, you can come along when I go to Transia to bring Steve back!”

He swallowed hard, still staring at the book as if it might skitter away the instant he took his eyes off it. “What…” he licked his lips, tried again. “What will happen after? To… it?”

“What my sister needs to assist you has been scanned and decrypted already,” T’Challa put in, gravely serious. “Of the rest, only that information which can be used to correct the damage HYDRA has done in other places will be preserved. I thought you might prefer to burn the book yourself. So that you could be certain it was really gone.”

Bucky drew in a shaking breath, so deep it made his ribs ache, and then risked a blink. The book was still there, a glower of faded red against the starry dark tiles, and God, wouldn’t it have been better for the damned thing to be burned to ash and mulched as soon as they had it in hand? Even if that meant Bucky stayed in the tube for longer, at least this… this cancerous bundle of ideas would have been entirely gone.

But no. He knew ideas didn’t work that way. Once seeded, once spoken, they couldn’t be un-thought, no matter the poison, violence, and fire one could bring to bear. In his own way, Bucky had been the proving ground for that very fact. 

So the book, the physical record of HYDRA’s infection, would maybe, in the right hands, give the world something of a vaccine against what he’d had to survive. Bucky could live with that. Mainly because he had to, but still.

Bucky licked his lips, then straightened his shoulders and nodded. “Okay,” he said, tearing his gaze away to meet Romanoff’s, “Okay. You got a match?”


	4. Capture the Flag

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Family baggage, smoking craters, and a knock-down, drag-out fight.

~*Russoff hunting lodge, Mt. Wundagore, Transia *~  
~* Wanda Maximoff *~

“What’s this, and why is it radioactive?”

Wanda sighed and looked up from the dough she was kneading (because stereotypes bedamned, she wanted _kulich_ , damn it!) 

Stark had come in from the garage – which apparently they could get into, now that the electric door locks worked again – carrying Babka Dynya’s satchel of ‘remedies’ in one hand.

Sam, who had been conducting a thorough inventory of the pantry supplies, poked his head around the corner and rolled his eyes. “That’s what passes for local alternative healthcare,” he said, returning to the table, and what Wanda supposed must be either his worst-case rationing plan, or else the only thing that was keeping him from hovering over Steve’s bed and trying to _glower_ the serum into healing whatever was wrong with the man. “The villagers who found Steve sent it when we brought him up here.”

Stark gave the bag a skeptical look, but carried it into the kitchen all the same. “Okay, not that I have anything against traditional medicine, but _radioactive_?” He held up the bag and gave it a shake. 

“If you’re so afraid of it,” Wanda asked, shaping the dough with more energy than it really required, “why did you bring it into the house?”

“I’m not afraid of it,” Stark said, whipping around to glare at her. “Lots of things are radioactive – my arc reactor, Doctor Banner, occasionally you, if FRIDAY’s readings are accurate, which they always are. It’s just-”

“It’s a bunch of different stuff, Stark,” Sam sighed. “And I’m sure some of it’s even effective, assuming I knew what the hell any of it was, or what I was dealing with here, but since I don’t, it’s just a bunch of leaves and dirt in bottles.”

“Put it on the counter.” Wanda slammed the bread onto its floured baking stone and dropped the towel over it. “There,” she tilted her chin when she noticed Stark’s nervous hesitation. “I’ll tell you what’s in it as soon as I wash my hands.”

“And you’ll know that how?” Stark asked, but put the bag where she’d said. “Your psychokinesis powers give-”

“I can read,” she ground back, shaking the water savagely off her hands, “With _out_ an Artificial Secretary to translate everything into English for me.”

“OK!” Sam shoved back his chair and stood, hands on his hips. “This shit? This needling each other cause you two don’t want to deal with the shit you got laying between you? This is _not_ sustainable!” Wanda looked away from his glare, but could feel it lingering on her face as she opened the satchel and began setting the bottles and jars on the counter.

“I was just-” Stark began, and Sam cut him off at once. Something small and mean inside Wanda was glad to see the he had no more tolerance for the billionaire’s protest than he’d had for hers. She told it to be quiet and continued to unload the bag.

“We got a problem bigger then both of you upstairs right now,” Sam told them both, clearly at the end of his own patience. “And it is not getting better on its own. I don’t know what’s happening to Steve, or why the serum can’t get it under control, but I do know that we’re in hostile territory right now. There are at least two sides to that fight outside, assuming the UN hasn’t sent troops in, and none of them are gonna be too friendly if they find us camping out in the dead President’s hunting lodge! So you two poking each other’s bruises just cause your own bruises sting? That shit needs to stop. Right now.”

“Or what, you’ll send us to our rooms?” Stark challenged, and Wanda just barely held back a hiss of dismay to hear it.

Sam’s face stilled for a moment, eyebrows high in disbelief, but then he broke into a smile that was wide, friendly, and utterly terrifying as he shook his head. “Aw no, man, you two are adults; I wouldn’t disrespect either of you like that. But you know, I _am_ a trained trauma counselor, with a specialty in complex PTSD.” Stark backed up a step, as if it was Sam who was suddenly radioactive now. “And if you keep on decompensating like you have been, and displacing it onto each other, I might just have to sit you both down and ask some questions about your childhoods. You know – see if we can work out some healthier coping strategies for dealing with your baggage?”

Stark’s face drained of color. “Was that the proximity alarm?” he asked, eyes darting, “I think that was the proximity alarm. I’m gonna go check the cameras...” And just like that, he was gone.

Sam turned on Wanda, all stern mouth and accusing finger before Stark even made it up the stairs. “And you-”

“I know,” Wanda sighed, already regretting every word she’d spoken. “It’s just… he’s so much like Pietro; always poking, always mocking, always has to be the cleverest, but-”

“But he’s not Pietro,” Sam soothed, coming to her side, “and that makes you mad all over again that Pietro’s gone. I get it, believe me. Sometimes Steve reminds me of Riley so hard I just want to punch him, but what good would that do? Riley wouldn’t feel it, cause he’d still be dead, and Steve wouldn’t really get it, even if he knew why I needed to swing. It just builds bad blood, girl.”

Wanda nodded, reaching in for the last bundle at the bottom of the bag. “I know. And we have plenty of bad blood to begin with, it’s just...” she froze, hands tingling, and whispered, “Sam?”

“And you know if you can get past the bad ways he reminds you of your brother,” Sam went on, unheeding, “you’ll probably find some of the good things about Pietro in there too.”

“Sam!” Wanda tried again, lifting the bundle out of the bag. She let her hand drop with it, not quite able to open her fingers against the deep, strong current of _something_ that was running through it.

The bundle was flat, hard and round inside its wrapping of bloodstained blue – it felt something like a thick, heavy salad plate, and made a muffled sort of klunk when its edge tapped the granite counter top.

“That’s… Steve’s undershirt,” Sam observed after an appalled moment of silence. Then he reached out and gently pried it from Wanda’s grip. He didn’t seem to feel the energy, or at least was not as transfixed by it as she had been, and his fingers had no trouble untying the shredded cloth from the flat disc of fired clay inside it. 

The feel of it might have left him unimpressed, but the sight drew his breath in, sharp and tight through his teeth. The clay made a louder klunk when he dropped it this time, rusty brown flakes of dried blood scattering with the chips of clay they had clung to. And there, pressed deeply into the top, was the splayed hand print of a man.

They both knew that if they spread Steve’s hand like that, it would fit perfectly into the bloody clay imprint.

~* Avengers HQ, Upstate New York *~  
~* Jim Rhodes *~

“So what you’re trying to tell me,” Jim cut in, “Is that Cap got mauled by werewolves earlier this week, and you can’t move him of an active war zone because he’s in the middle of a second stage, trans-system lycanthropy infection. That about sum things up?”

The line was silent for a long moment, as if none of them could think of a way to answer now that he’d named the elephant they’d all been trying to dance around.

Then Tony coughed, and gave it a solid try. “Lycanthropy?” he challenged, voice bright, hollow, and desperate. “Zagnut, Werewolves are only real in-”

“You fought aliens over Manhattan five years ago,” Jim shut him down without a scrap of mercy. “And then you used one of those aliens’ fashion accessories to make Vision and a whole army of other robots besides. I think maybe under the circumstances, Tones, you could maybe take the existence of Werewolves as given.”

“He’s right, Stark,” Wilson put in grudgingly, “I’ve been trying to look at it from the medical side of things, but Loup Garou...” he sighed, and from the rustle, Jim could picture him scrubbing his hands over his face. “Can I just say I hate how that adds up?”

“Not Garou,” Jim told him, quelling the old, and deep urge to guard that knowledge like the killing secret he’d always been taught it must be. “Loup Garou are born shifters, or else they just carry the gene and pass it on to their kids. Wolf shape doesn’t spread like a disease from bite to bite with them.”

Another pregnant pause. “It doesn’t?”

“No,” he answered, sending a silent apology to his southern cousins for blabbing. “And the moon’s got nothing to do with their changes either. This is classic WyrWulf stuff you’re describing here.”

“The old Babkas at the orphanage always told us stories about the Wundagore Mountain Wolves,” Wanda spoke up finally, a rattling background rumble accompanying her opened channel. “Mostly to frighten us all into behaving, but always they said the moon would call the _Lupescu_ out to hunt, and Sokovia is not too far from Transia for a hungry wolf to travel in a night.”

“And you never mentioned this why?” Tony put in, all scathing sharp edges and alarm at the crumbling borders of his understanding. “Because I kinda feel like this would have been relevant-”

“I never mentioned it because I’m tired of you taking me for a superstitious hick or a child when I try to talk to you,” she fired back.

“Easy, you two,” Sam quelled in the exhausted tone of day care workers everywhere, and Jim couldn’t help but smile, because godDAMN, did he know how that felt.

“Maximoff, what are you doing?” Jim cut in before Tony could clap back and escalate things. “It sounds like you’re in a car.”

“That’s because I am,” she sighed, and yeah, the rumble of road noise was pretty obvious on her channel now. “I’m going back to Dragorin to see if the woman who first treated Steve’s wounds after the attack can tell us what we need to do now.”

“You think she’s a werewolf?”

“No,” Sam answered, “She isn’t. At least I’m pretty sure she isn’t, but her daughter said she’s treated attacks like this before, and cured them.”

“Cured?” Jim blinked, confused, “I didn’t think that was possible with lycanthropy.” Because usually, so the aunties all said, you either changed with the moon, or you threw it off, but carried the infection the rest of your life. Or, as happened more often, the fight between wyr and wulf burned a person right up, and their first full moon was their last.

“Well I didn’t know you had a working knowledge of actual, real-world werewolves, Rhodes, so that kinda makes us even?” Tony put in.

“Put it on the board if you’re keeping score,” Jim answered with a grin, “But we ain’t been anywhere near ‘even’ for ten years. Now this healer woman; Wilson, you think she’s legit?”

Maximoff answered. “She’s lived here on the mountain longer than any of us have been alive. And there’s something… I can’t say for sure, but we _need_ her to look at Steve again. After his last seizure, with the teeth, and… and what his feet did...” Jim winced, imagining it all too readily.

“And her family’s pretty definitely caught up with the rebels too,” Tony put in, “Which means if we can get her on our side, that’s one less group that’ll want to burn us alive if they find us here.”

“Taking sides in a local revolt isn’t something the UN would approve of, Tones,” Jim reminded him with a smile he couldn’t help. 

“Yeah, well from what I’ve been seeing on some of the computers around this place, Russoff was taking direction from Russia, the US, HYDRA, and ISIL all at once,” Tony came back, “so I’m pretty sure the UN wants to keep its hands off this place as long as it can. Which means they don’t need to even know I’m here.”

“Yeah, well rumors of a Presidential assassination-or-maybe-a-kidnapping, shelling and bombs in five Transian cities, and at least two different revolutionary factions claiming to have bio-weapons means the UN is a little more inclined to ask questions than normal,” Jim said. “Also, Secretary Ross has let me know that he would _really_ like to consult with you on a possible fact-finding, or rescue mission for the Transian President, as soon as possible.”

Wilson snorted in disgust. “Well _that’s_ handy.”

“Yeaaah, but let’s not,” Tony answered. “FRIDAY, tell the General that I’m busy partying with rappers and supermodels, and I’ll call him in a couple of days when I sober up.”

“Will do, Boss,” the AI chirped, “Though I doubt he’ll believe it.”

“Why not? I party with rappers and supermodels!”

“Maybe she means the sobering up part?” Jim offered, helpfully.

“I mean the calling him back part,” FRIDAY supplied primly. “You haven’t returned any of the General’s calls since 2016, Boss.”

“Well can you blame me?” Tony asked, all wounded innocence, “Dude’s a one-note symphony, all ‘haven’t you found them yet’ and ‘are you even looking’ and ‘I should lock you up for contempt’. I tell you, Thunderbolt Ross could bore a wall to death.”

“Oh no, that’s not contemptuous at all,” Wilson put in, but it was easy to hear his smile.

“No.” Wanda said, the word flat and brittle, and utterly without humor, “Oh no...”

“What?” Wilson barked at once, “What is it?”

But the girl only cursed in Sokovian as the rattle of road noise turned abruptly more raucous – as if her vehicle was struggling to manage a blown-out road, or battlefield.

“What’s happening?” Tony demanded, his comm switching from earbud to helmet pickup. “Do you need help?”

But the cursing and the road noise was the only answer, filling the channel with chop until all at once, with a sliding grind, the background noise stopped, leaving only her breath, ragged and damp over the line.

“Wanda,” Tony ordered into the ringing silence, “Turn on your transponder. I’ll be there to get you in five or less-”

“No,” she murmured in a voice like shattered glass. “Don’t… you don’t need to come.”

“What’s wrong?” Wilson urged.

“The village…” she took a breath, deep and wet. “Dragorin. It’s gone.”

~* Dragorin village, Mt Wundagore, Transia *~  
~* Tony Stark *~

“Okay, so technically,” Tony said as he landed in what had once probably been the village square, “it’s not _actually_ gone.”

Surprisingly though, Wanda didn’t rise to it. Perched on the edge of what had once been someone’s garden wall, she didn’t turn to meet his entrance with a glare, or a finger, even a clanging eyeroll. She just sat still with her back to the square, watching the smoke rise straight and thick against the looming flanks of the mountain. 

If Tony’s HUD hadn’t clocked her as the only living thing over twenty pounds in the bombed-out village, he’d have been worried. “I mean, unless I’m in the wrong village, and I’m talking to a stranger who doesn’t understand English at all and might be about to turn around and shoot me,” he joked, heading toward her perch, “in which case I need to update the scanning-”

“I told you you didn’t need to come,” she said at last, voice thick with the cold as he came to the wall. “It’s too late to save anyone. Whatever happened, we missed it.” Her bitter words hung in the air between them, cloudy with a condemnation that for once, Tony didn’t figure was aimed at him. 

“Yeah, about that,” Tony observed, turning a slow circle so his scanners could confirm the readings he’d gotten from above, “I know we’re not close or anything, but you’re out here on your own, and you turned off your com, so...”

“It’s off?” She reached up at once, plucked it from her ear with a frown. “I didn’t deactivate it.” 

“Yeah well, turns out that werewolves are a real thing in this part of the world, did you know?” Tony shrugged, resisting the urge to pluck the failed unit from her hand and examine it himself, “So I just thought maybe you going dark out here on the moors without backup might not be the best idea, is all.” 

That got him the eyeroll he’d been expecting, and she turned, sweeping an arm at the tumult of churned earth, rubble, ice, and ash-dusted snow around them. “I’m safe enough, Stark. There’s literally no one here.”

“Yeah, that’s what my readings show too,” he agreed, boosting over a tumbled gap in the wall so he could peer under the slanting eaves at the collapsed house beyond it. “I wasn’t sure when I came in from above, because there’s some serious magnetic disruption going on in this wonderland, but even a close scan’s showing no bodies, no trapped survivors.” He aimed a scanner at the shed behind the collapsed house, and got exactly the readings he’d expected – nothing. “I mean, there’s some blood, and a few animals, but-”

“I couldn’t find anyone either,” Wanda sighed, coming up behind him. Her hands were dug deeply into her coat pockets, which Tony figured was either a sign of non-aggression, or in deference to the cold. “I thought maybe it was just this place. The energy here is…” she flicked a wary glance his way, then admitted, “It’s strange. Even when we were here before, I couldn’t really get a clear sense of it. The people, the houses, the land they lived on – it was almost like they were all exactly the same.”

“I… have no idea what to say to that,” Tony admitted, carefully skirting the collapsed entrance of a root cellar. “But I’ll tell you what I do know. There is a frankly appalling amount of depleted uranium ammunition lying around this place, and that stuff’s not cheap. Someone sent a lot of soldiers with a lot of guns to shoot this place up, and that should have resulted in a _lot_ more carnage than we’re seeing.” He turned back to her with a shrug he hoped might be reassuring. “Looks to me like the villagers got away, and maybe the troops just burned the place down out of spite.”

Wanda’s lips twisted, wry and annoyed at once. “Or they took everyone away and burned it down so the ones who escaped would starve or freeze,” she said.

“Not on that road, they didn’t,” Tony countered, pointing to the cratered, ruined track that led away down the mountain’s slope. “Nothing bigger than a jeep or an ATV would get over that, and helicopters would’ve blown all this loose snow away.” He shook his head. “No, the folks who lived here left before this happened.”

Wanda stared down into the root cellar, her eyes tracing the tumbled bins of food, dusted with snow, earth, and ash. “That doesn’t mean they’re safe,” she said. “No food, no shelter, all their tools, clothes, blankets… they’re all still here. I looked. How long can they last on the mountain with nothing?”

“If they’re planning to come back for what they had to leave,” he tried, “then they’ll do better than we will, hanging around here with the sun going down.” He turned, extended one boot and held his arm out over it – an olive branch he only then realized he’d never once offered the girl. “We ought to get back to the lodge. Wilson’s alone with Steve, and he was pretty freaked out when your comm went dead.”

Wanda gave his offered hand a skeptical look, but the corner of her mouth quirked upward from its pensive line. “Oh, _Sam_ was, freaked out, was he?” she asked as if she knew better.

“Oh yeah. He’d have come to get you himself, only we played Rock Paper Scissors for it, and I won. Plus,” Tony flexed and closed his fist twice in invitation, “his wing kit can’t fit over a parka, and his flight speed with a passenger kinda sucks. So I got the short straw.”

That won a grudging laugh out of her, but she still shook her head. “I’m not riding piggy back on your armor. The jeep is right over-”

“We should leave the jeep,” he cut her off, glancing toward the half-collapsed barn where she’d parked it. “We don’t need it, the road is a mess, and when the locals come back, they’ll need it. Come on,” he offered again. “I promise I won’t drop you.”

But the guilt had risen again, like drifting smoke before her eyes. “You really do think they’re...” she asked, voice soft as she stared out across the shattered landscape, “They’ll come back?”

The question wasn’t the one Wanda had started to ask, and they both knew it. Her face was still though, stoic and determined, but with a shine of grief to her eyes that Tony knew the feeling of all too well. 

_It’s not your fault,_ Tony wanted to tell her, and _You couldn’t have known._ But even if he could say the words without choking on them, would she believe them, coming from him? Because the girl could read minds, after all, and when, in his own ridiculous life, had he ever admitted that he couldn’t have known, couldn’t have stopped, couldn’t have fixed, couldn’t have saved any damned thing that he came to regret afterward?

Steve would have known what to say, he always did. But Tony… he didn’t know how to offer Wanda any kind of reassurance without sounding like a hypocrite. So he went with the truth, and hoped it might make a difference.

“I think people don’t quit this easy,” he said, taking gentle hold of her elbow to draw her in. “People who don’t have much, they protect what really matters, right?”

Wanda nodded, warily, and let Tony guide her up onto his boot. “Reach across my shoulders. Feel the hand hold there?” Tony took the subtle shift in the armor’s balance as her answer, and slipped his arm around her waist. “What they really can’t replace, or do without, they don’t let go of,” he went on, eyes flicking across the HUD, activating the suit’s stealth features, and adjusting their return vector to account for Wanda’s weight and lack of gloves. 

“If these people didn’t have a place to run to, or a hope of coming back,” he finished, as he boosted them gently into the air, “I think they’d have died defending Dragorin.”

“I hope you’re right,” she answered, and with her free hand, mirrored Tony’s repulsor position. “I really do.”

“What are you-” Tony began, but then a scarlet wave of extreme acceleration screwed the hell out of his calculations, and he had to turn all his attention toward the task of not crashing them into the trees. 

“NOT! HELPFUL!” Tony yelped over the sound of Wanda’s excited laughter as the ground blurred away beneath them.

~*~

Neither one noticed the man in the forest.

Upwind of the village’s clearing, still and pale as a birch trunk in the lowering gloom beneath the winter trees, he had watched them. With a mouth full of snow so that not even his breath would cloud the cold air around him, he had waited. 

And now he tracked with pale eyes the flight of something unseen up the mountain’s flanks. Invisible, but fast, and flying low enough to shake the snow from a single stripe of trees as it went. The wake behind it’s flight was a swatch of evergreen, bare and dark, and straight as a good road through the snow-draped white of the forest. 

It pointed over the ridge line like a compass arrow no one could miss.

~*Russoff hunting lodge, Mt. Wundagore, Transia *~  
~* Steve Rogers *~

“You,” Bucky snarled, nose to nose and glowering from one eye as, with one hand wound in his hair he craned Steve’s head back on his neck, “are a fuckin’ _animal_!”

“Leggo,” Steve protested, but shoved only weakly at Bucky’s weight crowding him against the alley wall. He was still mad enough to chew nails and spit horseshoes, but Bucky wasn’t the one he wanted to tear strips off. “I ain’t-”

“No, keep yer damn head back ya twerp, or you’re gonna fuckin drown!” Bucky insisted, flicking a nervous squint at the alley mouth as a distant siren started up, streets away. “And you are. You bit him right on the fuckin face – on the _face_ , Stevie!” And Buck was trying, clearly trying to maintain the outrage, but Steve could hear the manic giggle rising through his best friend’s rant, could see it tilting his lips, lush and knuckle-scraped, lips up at the corners.

Steve felt his own smile bloom, savage and unbidden across his face at the memory, and didn’t even care how it made his own split lip burn and bleed afresh. “Made ‘im stop though,” he growled. “And maybe next time he thinks he can do whatever he likes to whoever he wants, he’ll think twice!” 

Bucky made a noise of disgust that neither of them was buying. “You saw the car they were driving, Stevie. Course he can do what he wants,” he said, starting in on Steve’s bloody nose with a handkerchief as the unconcerned traffic rolled by.

And that was the problem really, wasn’t it? The uptown arrow collars coming across the Bridge to have their fun where they figured nobody could afford to say no to them. They could pay for a Packard, and a driver to stay with it, and to have sick and blood cleaned off the kind of clothes that nobody in twenty miles had ever worn in their lives. And that was their way of letting everyone hereabouts know that they could pay for cops, and for judges, and for juries too, so if you didn’t give them what they wanted, they wouldn’t mind just taking it, and calling it sport.

“Not on my street, he can’t,” Steve mumbled, hot and hard under his skin, still so brim-full of the indignant joy of the fight that he felt like he could take fire from it and glow like a meteor in the summer night. “Not if he don’t want stitches to explain to the ladies uptown.”

That startled a laugh right out of Bucky, and his fingers loosed from Steve’s scruff all at once, smoothing into a cradling grip that settled Steve’s forehead up snug against Bucky’s. Steve still couldn’t go anywhere, or tilt his face down, but now he minded that less. 

“You,” Bucky murmured, his breath dark with whiskey, edged with blood, and simmering with heat, “are… a fuckin’… animal...”

“Grrrr...” Steve said, and lunged to bite Bucky’s teasing lips.

Only…

“WHOA!” Tony yelped, flailing back from the bed in a clattering, glass dropping scramble that only stopped when he fetched up against the wall. “Down boy!” he commanded, white faced and trembling, one hand pressed tight to where his arc reactor used to be. “Sit! Heel!”

“What?” Steve grumbled, blinking hard. The Red Hook alley behind Rosey Meyer’s wobbled and broke into nonsense under wakeful scrutiny. “To… Tony?” He squinted, rubbed at his sore eyes as the walls of an unfamiliar bedroom congealed out of the shadows. A dim swatch of hallway light stretching in across the floor, caught like ice-shine off the water that was spreading across the boards. “Is that you?”

“That depends,” Tony challenged, rubbing at his chest, “You gonna rip my lungs out if I say yes? Cause I mean yeah, we haven’t exactly had a chance to clear the air or anything since I got here, but I was hoping maybe we could skip the grudge match and maybe-”

“Why?” Steve lurched up in the bed, sore and stiff, and very aware of the places where the bandages felt like they still ought to be there, but needing very much to address the fear he could hear lurking under Tony’s caustic wit. “Why would I… Tony, of course I’m not going to hurt you! Why would you even-”

And that, of course, was the moment his stomach decided to announce to the world that it had been empty for a _very_ long time. Steve let his question trail away to appalled silence as Tony erupted into a nervy, manic giggle at the grinding internal roar.

“Christ,” Tony wheezed, pushing away from the wall and turning to pick up a tray from the dresser beside him. “I am living in a Warren Zevon song, I swear. Soup! I brought you soup, that Wilson says you ought to eat.” He took a step, hesitated, “Don’t, like, _lunge_ at me this time though.”

Steve rolled his eyes to hide the blush. “I didn’t lunge at you. I mean… I was dreaming.”

“Of what,” Tony challenged, setting the tray across Steve’s knees, “Snausages?”

“Of...” A rare moment of good sense kept Bucky’s name behind Steve’s teeth. “Nothing important,” he answered primly, plucking the spoon from under Tony’s hand, lest the man try to _feed_ him or something.

“You nearly bit my nose off for that nothing important,” Tony countered, shaking out the napkin, and only then noticing that Steve had no collar to tuck it into. 

“You usually creep up on people when they’re sleeping?” Steve caught the napkin out of his hands, picked the bowl up, and sipped. It was chicken soup, savory and chowder-thick, and it filled Steve’s nose like a benediction from heaven as he drank. But even that couldn’t quite edge out the shift when the prickly, coppery panic smell of Tony’s skin warmed into a blush like cinnamon candy.

“I was just checking your breathing,” Tony mumbled, backing away with his hands in his pockets, “Wilson said your lungs might be-” A sudden yowl of warning, throaty and shrill and right underfoot, shocked the banter out of them both. 

Tony spun, hand outstretched and limned with repulsor light as Steve lurched around in the bed, half-full soup bowl a ready missile in the curve of his wrist. Sternly unimpressed, Little Brother just leveled them both with a luminous glare, then went back to licking up the spilled water from the floor, just as if Tony had not been about to step on its fluffy tail in the dark.

“Why’d you have to let the damned cat in?” Steve let out a shaking breath, teeth sore in his jaw from the sudden adrenaline clench as Tony picked up the glass, then tacked a wide circle around the cat to set it by the door, “That thing hates me.”

“Which would be why he’s been cuddling with you all day, I guess?” Tony smirked, leaning against the wall. “Or why he hasn’t let me come in here to check on you without a possessive threat display since he tried to chew through the armor yesterday?”

Steve blinked, peered down at the cat, and frowned. “You were… taking me away?” he remembered vaguely, as if through a haze of years. 

“I was _offering_ to evac you to somewhere less primeval,” Tony corrected primly as the cat finished his drink and sat back to watch them both with lantern-bright eyes. “Anyway, I don’t think Cujo there understood it either way. Wilson said animals can smell it when a… um… when someone’s about to have a…”

“A fit?” Steve provided wearily, thinking of yet another box he would get to check the next time anyone gave him a medical history form. Then Little Brother leapt to the bed, and Steve’s full-body flinch to get his feet out of range set the tray rattling. But the cat only spared him one scornful glare before hopping up into the windowsill and turning his attention to whatever was going on in the night outside.

“Yeah, that,” Tony replied, “Only I’m _told_ that people don’t use that word for it. Anymore. Also, they don’t use ‘spaz’, or ‘episode’ for it.” He nodded, as if for emphasis, and Steve found himself smiling to imagine Sam ladling down that spoonful of correction on Tony’s head. It wouldn’t have been pretty. Funny, maybe, depending on your viewpoint, but not pretty.

“Between you an’ me an’ the cat,” Steve offered, snagging a hunk of bread then pushing the tray aside, “I had a fit. It’s what we called it when I was a kid, and it doesn’t burn me to call it that now. But I’m over it, I think,” he added, “and I’m tired as hell of being in bed, so-”

“Ouuuuut.” Little Brother announced, standing up on his haunches to rattle the casement windows. Steve hated how he flinched again, but there was something about the darkness, or maybe the dream that had come before it, that had his blood up, and his nerves prickling. 

“Seriously?” he grumbled at the cat as Tony snickered, “You can’t bother anybody else in this whole place when you wanna go do your business? You gotta let the wind into _my_ room?”

“Well, at least he’s not leaving surprises under the bed?” Tony suggested. “Look, just let him out. The furnace is on now, and if you get too chilly, we can start up that fireplace.” Steve glanced at the grate, remembered the smell of snow and hot ash, the orange slide of light and heat across his drowsing senses. “Or,” Tony added with an eloquent shrug, “you could, y’know, put on some clothes or something. Which I figure maybe you’d wanna do before you come downstairs anyway.”

“Sure,” Steve grumbled as the cat swiped at him impatiently, “You bring me some pajamas from home?”

The light smile dropped from Tony’s face as he shoved his hands into his pockets. “No, I brought a body bag for you from home,” he said, and his voice was hard and hurt all of a sudden. “I really thought you’d died, Steve.” Tony rubbed a hand at the base of his skull, just below the hairline – just where they’d both had that little… thing of Tony’s injected under their skin. In the thin, distant light, Steve could see the area was still red and raw, as though Tony had clawed at it in distress.

“Tony….” Steve began, not sure what to say, but not able to keep his own hand from rising to his neck. “I’m-”

“Ouuut!” the cat yelled, and took another swipe at Steve’s elbow. If not for super soldier reflexes, the little fucker might’ve tagged him too.

“Stark?” Wanda called in a soft, carrying voice from down the hall. A hospital voice, Steve had always thought of it – courteous and smooth, but weighted with worry, and weariness. 

“Be right there,” Tony called back, striding over to take Steve’s empty tray off the bed, and smirking when Little Brother gave him a hiss for it. “Look, you negotiate with Shere Khan. I’ll go get you some more soup, and then we can see if there’s something in one of these closets that’ll fit you, OK?”

Steve smirked and waved Tony at the door. “First new clothes I ever owned came from the Fort Lehigh commissary, Tony,” he said. “I’m used to ill-fitting hand me downs. Go on – I’m still really hungry.”

Then when he left, Steve turned to the cat with a stern eye. “You,” he told it, reaching for the window latch and slapping the cat’s paw away when it swatted at him again, “have no damn manners!” Little Brother made no answer though, unless he had to count the triple tail-flip it gave once it had shoved the windows apart and leapt out onto the roof, untroubled by the deep snow.

“You’re welcome,” Steve called to the cat, leaning out to catch the window closed… then he stopped, half-hung over the sill, and utterly transfixed by the night. Something… some _one_ was out there. 

Steve peered at the trees, looming and dark at the edge of the lodge’s clearing. He felt the idle nighttime stirring of the wind raising every hair across his skin as it brought him the tapestry of scents: Pine and snow, earth and stone, rust and wood and smoke and moss... and wolf.

The noise that rose up out of his chest was almost below hearing, but he felt it in the vibration of his belly against the icy sill, felt it spread like heat through his bones as he let his mouth fall open, lips peeled back snarl-like to sip the scent more deeply.

Out in the hallway, Wanda’s voice braided with Tony’s, each of them hiss-whispering over the other. “...perimeter alarms have… heat signatures are… can’t tell how...can’t just go out and...”

Only one wolf’s scent came from upwind; a male, young and healthy, with recent man-kills still clinging to his pelt. 

Steve’s eyes opened, sharpened to the dark as if the silver of moonrise spreading under the horizon had already washed the world alight. Only one upwind. Meant to draw them out with thoughts of capture, or of driving the challenging male away… Only one, waiting as bait to call the rest down the instant Steve’s people broke cover. 

“Like hell!” Steve snarled, barely hearing the garble his tight-clenched teeth made of the words, barely noticing how the whelming wave of scarlet rage warmed his skin like a sweeping pelt of fur, barely noticing how his grip was dragging deep gouges in the windowsill. “Like hell you will!”

“Steve?” Tony’s voice from behind, careful and ominous. “Steve, come away from the window.”

He growled, struggled his legs free of the bedclothes. The wolf outside wasn’t moving, but Steve could hear furtive creaks in the snow, soft, powdery plumps dropping from jostled branches, and very faintly, the rustle of breath panting past long, sharp teeth. The big male? He was bait, and Steve knew better than to take it.

That didn’t mean he was going to let the trap close on his people though. Trap like this, half the work was done the instant you knew you were in it, and it wasn’t the first time Steve had been surrounded in a moving ambush and had to kick his way out.

“Seriously,” Tony said, starting across the room, hands out and trembling, the metal fear-smell simmering in the air around him, “We got movement out in the woods, Steve, all around the cabin.”

“Yeshh,” he said, mush-mouthed with the strain of speaking through his anger, “I’m onn’t.”

“What is-” Wanda appeared in the doorway, and her careful hospital voice broke into a ragged gasp as Steve rocked his weight forward and scrabbled to get his foot up onto the windowsill. “Steve?!” She gasped, and reflected in the open casement, he could see both of them – the girl red-handed, wreathed in light, the man spreading a metal web over his palm – creeping toward him.

“Yeah, get him!” Tony yelped, and they both lunged. But Steve was quicker, angrier, and not about to let their well meaning protection leave his people trapped without him there to fight for them.

He snarled, dug his toes in hard, and lunged out the window. The snow on the roof was thick and soft – not much cushion for his rolling fall, but enough. He turned his tumble into a lope as soon as he caught traction on the shingles, picking up momentum along the lodge’s slanting roof before he leapt for the barn, and then for the shed beyond, and for the treeline beyond that. 

And for the waiting wolves hidden in the trees, who would not see him coming until it was far too late.

~* Sam Wilson *~

Sam hadn’t taken his flight harness off since that morning, when Stark and cockblocked him from going to Dragorin after Wanda. When the screaming began upstairs, he finally understood why.

He grabbed his guns, slammed the wing-pack onto its shoulder clips, and took the stairs two at a time. If they’d been wider, he wouldn’t have bothered running at all.

Steve’s room wasn’t the biggest on that floor, but it was the farthest they could get him from the front door. It also gave a good long hallway for Sam’s run-up though, and with his flight goggles reading the details, Sam didn’t need the hall lights on to see the trouble good and clear.

A huge shape filled the window frame, hulking wide and shaggy against the stars. On the floor, Stark sprawled and clutched his knee in a slick of water and broken dishes. Wanda huddled at the foot of the bed, clutching her skull with both hands, blood seeping between her fingers. Sam couldn’t see Steve anywhere, and that was _so_ not okay!

“What the hell?” he shouted, raising his guns just as the thing in the window lunged out and fell, rattling the whole house as it hit the roof below.

“NO!” Stark shouted, scrambling up into Sam’s sightline and waving both hands wide, “Fuck, don’t shoot him!” 

Outside the window, the thing’s snout came up, silhouetted against the snowy trees; jaw half open to show ragged, jutting teeth, its ears pricking high over a shag of amber that spread visibly down its chest as Sam watched it scent the air. It cut a single glance back at the room, eyeshine scarlet against irises of summer-sky blue; visible for all of a second before it lunged out of view.

And then the penny dropped.

“That was _Steve_?!” Sam’s boots skidded on the floor as he lunged past Stark’s goalie-pose to get up onto the bed and look for himself.

He got his head and shoulders outside just in time to see the… no. No amount of science education could make him see a man in the massive shape leaping like an insane base jumper from the corner of the lodge roof. But catching the eaves of the barn with perfectly functional, if viciously clawed hands, it proved handily that it… he was no wolf either. 

Not just yet, anyway.

“No,” he muttered, leaning hard into the cold air. “No, no, no, you asshole, you are _not_ running off on your own. Not this time!”

Sam’s goggles ranged the distance to the… to Steve as he leapt to the barn, then they calculated the angle for an intercept arc, and locked the jump-plan in. It was gonna be a hard thrust, but Sam had taken worse to keep a friend alive. 

“Sam,” Wanda said, voice thick and shaky over the sound of the Iron Man assembling itself out of whatever corner Stark had stashed it in, “Sam come back!”

“He needs backup,” Sam answered, hefting one knee up onto the ragged sill and bracing for thrust. Steve had been barely held together beneath his bandages earlier that day, he had no fucking business jumping off so much as a pillow, let alone-

“Wilson, no!” A gauntleted hand grabbed his ankle and hauled. Sam had no choice but to fall back, cussing as his boots tangled in the bedclothes. “You’re practically naked,” Stark hissed, eyes wide in the dark as he gripped Sam’s flight harness to hold him down, “We don’t know how many of those things are out there! Are you fucking nuts?”

“What things?” Sam planted one boot on Stark’s armored shoulder and pushed to no avail. “If Steve’s out there, then -” 

And that was when the screaming started for real. 

Wholly inadequate word, ‘screaming’; the sound was far, far bigger than that. The sound coming out of those trees was enormous – siren shrill in one voice, rattled through with the kind of bellowing roar from at least two more, that felt like an earthquake in your bones. It was the kind of noise that made the wary thing inside Sam’s guts – the canny, perceptive thing that told him when to dodge and when to wheel, and when to dive to earth; the thing that had dissuaded him from kitting out of his flight rig even after Stark brought Wanda home safe and sound – insist that he wasn’t safe on the ground, that nobody was safe on the ground, that he needed to be aloft, aloft, aloft, now, now, now.

“Oh god,” Wanda groaned as Sam, in his shock, let Stark pull him the rest of the way off the bed. “Oh god, he’s… They’re...”

“How’s your head, kid?” Stark asked, letting Sam go now he’d been collected to the floor-huddle with the rest of them. “You hit the bed pretty hard. You need Wilson to-”

“I’m fine,” she gritted, pushing up to her feet as if one half of her face weren’t sheeted dark with blood, “I need to see...”

“We gotta go get him,” Sam breathed, his lizard brain trembling under the sound of something big and angry screaming for its life outside, “They nearly killed him last time, and Steve’s still- He’s not even-”

“He’s still a super soldier,” Stark came back, kneeling up as if he meant to hook Wanda back into shelter too, “And this time he knows what he’s up against.” But for all his confident words, Stark’s face was icy pale, and his eyes were wide with alarm in the dark. “And he’s got onboard weaponry this time. Did you see what he did to the windowsill?”

“So what? You just wanna leave him out there?” Sam challenged, rage shoving the fear aside with a welcome burn as he shoved off the floor. “We stay inside while he...” he waved a furious arm at the window, the woods, the fucking _werewolves_ brawling out in the night.

“No,” Stark snarled, rattling to his feet more gracefully than the armor should have allowed, “I want _you two_ to stay inside, where you can’t get mauled by infectious fucking Cryptids, okay?! Meanwhile I, in my _armor_ , will go out there to help Steve fight the werewolves!”

“It’s not a fucking contest!” Sam threw his hands wide. “There’s more than a couple out there, I can hear it! I can stay aloft, out of-”

“You don’t know how high they can jump! And your wings won’t maneuver under those trees at speed.”

“Speed ain’t the point-”

“Guys...”

“But not getting bitten _is_ the point!” Stark shouted back. “I need you two to hold the lodge, okay? We can’t have those things inside when I get him back to-”

“GUYS!” The window slammed closed like a guillotine. Sam whirled to find red light wreathing the frame like electrified bars, and glowing with menace from the pale, high bones of Wanda’s face as she pointed at the ground outside. “Look...”

A black wolf stood in the yard; massive, menacing, and still; utterly untroubled by the screaming and thrashing of its pack beneath the trees. It stared, lantern-eyed, up at the window, and at them, behind the window. And that, the wary thing inside Sam’s guts was certain, was no wolf either – not in any way that really mattered.

“Mother _fucker_ ” Stark breathed, voice skidding from analog to digital as his visor clammed shut on the curse. 

In the yard, the wolf tilted its head as if it had heard. It cut one dismissive glance toward the thrashing trees, then trotted closer and made a clear calculation of its odds for leaping to the roof: of bringing a whole new fight right up to them.

The wary thing in Sam’s guts was pretty sure those odds were solidly in the wolf’s favor. Despite the weight of his guns in his hands; despite the scarlet glitter of Wanda’s power lacing over the window; despite the blue-white gleam of Stark’s palm repulsor reflecting like a star from the trembling glass. Something in that too-keen stare, that grinning gape of jaw and lolling tongue informed Sam that he had never before – never really – known what it felt like to be prey.

“Stand clear,” Iron Man said as the black wolf gathered itself to leap. 

The repulsor’s charging whine raised the hairs on Sam’s neck. But before Sam could grab for Stark’s gauntlet and express in emphatic terms what a terrible idea it would be to blow a goddamned _hole_ in the wall, the wolf sprang. 

Something else sprang too – something enormous and fast. A blur of motion and math in the corner of Sam’s HUD that hit the leaping wolf like a bullet train, and drove it straight into the side of the house. 

The lodge shuddered like a drum, shouldering snow from its eaves in a great plummet of white. Unseen below, the wolf screamed like it was being torn in half, and whatever had hit the wolf roared like that had been the plan all along. Sam wasn’t the only one in that narrow little room at the end of the hall who screamed along.

“What was that?” Stark yelped. “FRIDAY, did you catch that? Anything? Damn it! Wilson?”

“I got nothin’,” Sam said, not quite able to put his guns away. “Just movement, and…” The wolf’s screams abruptly stopped, and its body tumbled back into view like two halves of a rag doll.

Sam choked. “Jesus, what could-”

“Was it...?” Wanda’s voice was low, trembling with horror, “Was that _Steve_?”

Across the lodge’s snowy yard, three more enormous wolves bolted from the trees at full speed.

“No,” Stark said, sounding faintly hysterical even through the armor’s digitizer as another figure broke from the trees, blood smirching his amber coat as he charged through the snow on two legs faster than the fleeing wolves had gone on four. “ _That’s_ Steve.”

Sam stared for all of the ten seconds it took for the… well, no hiding from it now, the werewolf to disappear after his prey. Then the other thing still unseen beneath the lodge’s eaves – the bigger thing, the wolf-killing thing – made a snarling sort of roar that brought the realities of the night right back home again.

The werewolves of Transia were real; Steve was out there in the forest, running with them, fighting with them, possibly becoming one of them. But the wolves were not the apex predators here, and as they heard the yelping start up again away down the mountain slope, not one of the Avengers in that tiny room was quite ready to guess just what was out there hunting them.


	5. Armistice Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Triumphs, setbacks, and Very Clear Air.

~* Royal Palace, Birnin Zana, Wakanda *~  
~* Bucky Barnes *~

_“Benign.”_

Blood was thrashing in his ears, chest bound up aching tight, jaw locked around the urge to scream. Or throw up. Alexander Pierce’s digtal ghost watched him suffer as he always had; with an expression that hovered somewhere between polite disdain, and patrician regret. 

“Fff...f….ffu...uckyou,” Bucky managed, barely getting his teeth apart.

The ghost was unimpressed. _“Homecoming.”_

It was harder to bear in English. He hadn’t expected that, but maybe he should have. Probably he should have.

They had conquered Lukin, and his Russian commands in two tries – five hours, two migraine treatments from the med-bay, and back to work afterward.

Those same jagged words though, delivered in _that_ language, conjured Alexander Pierce out of Bucky’s batshit brains, and somehow, in a way he couldn’t quite bear to parse out, that was far, _far_ harder to fight than Lukin’s commands had ever been. 

He did fight it though; fought it with every scrap of terror and rage he wished he’d been able to reach when the man had still had a pulse. Decades of trigger training punished him for the idea of defiance, but the rage in his guts was having none, and in his skull, the two battled like kaiju.

The vibranium restraints rattled against the bench, despite Bucky’s efforts to sit still, and not curl down tight over the pain of his twisting guts. “We should stop,” the Princess’s voice came over the speaker behind him, “Your stress hormones are spiking, and there’s a feedback loop starting in your-”

“Nuh,” Bucky grunted, shaking his head so hard the glasses nearly flew off him, “Fkn… Nuh!”

“I can refine the system’s neuron firing patterns,” she said, clearly not a girl who took refusals easily, “I don’t want to set off another seizure-”

“Do…” he gasped a breath and forced the world to focus so he could glare at the monitor. “Do... hon’tchoo stop! I cn’ doit!”

Digital-Pierce’s face creased into a frown, as if Bucky’s refusal had been meant for him. Disgust flashed across his features, in the particular flavor that Bucky usually saw just before he was ordered into the Chair for a wipe. But all the ghost said was, _“One.”_

And Bucky screamed.

Some distant part of his brain insisted this was a good sign – the projection hadn’t faded away. The memory monsters were still there, still impassively watching him suffer like a wing-plucked fly. He hadn’t slipped too far down the rabbit hole to keep Stark’s nightmare factory working. He was winning… even if it didn’t fucking feel like winning at all.

“James?” Natalia asked, her hair a flash of copper in the monitor, her voice a low, steady line in his churning world. Even if she _did_ keep using the wrong goddamned name. “Last one. Stop or go, you call it.”

He shook his head, eyes locked on Pierce as if he could light the man on fire with the crushing weight of his pure, atomic loathing. Distantly, he heard the Princess complaining, “This is inhumane...”

And of course, it was. It always had been – that was the fucking point, after all.

_“Freight Car.”_

The last word hit him like the thing it described.

It felt to Bucky, as if his brain had lurched inside his skull, hurled itself at its bony prison and demanded an immediate exit. He couldn’t tell if he screamed so hard his throat bled, but it felt like he maybe had.

The lights in the room – or maybe just his perception of them – strobed in time with his heartbeat, and Bucky gasped for breath, mentally preparing himself for yet another round of migraine, pain relievers, sensory deprivation hydrotherapy, and deep, personal disappointment. But then he caught a flash of movement through the blur of tears. Pierce hiked his trousers up to crouch in front of Bucky’s bench seat, gave Bucky a fatherly smile, and asked, _“Well, Soldier? Are you ready to comply?”_

It was the first time Bucky could remember actually _hearing_ those words in nearly seventy years.

He laughed – low and shaky at first, still not sure he wasn’t going to retch. But watching Pierce’s face close up like he’d just sniffed a turd, Bucky’s triumph, and his laugh grew exponentially meaner and more satisfying.

“Fuck,” he said.

“You,” he also said.

Pierce’s mouth pressed thin, and he looked to the side. _“Wipe him,”_ he told the digital doctors hovering behind their clipboards in the corner. _“Prep him.”_

And that was when Bucky shot him.

It was only a model gun, of course, and his hand was still constrained by the shackles, because Princess Shuri was not an idiot. Stark’s BARF system, however took the gun, the trigger pull, and Bucky’s intent for the genuine, Sig Sauer P365, 9mm article. And Bucky’s memory had no trouble whatsoever with painting in the fine details of a point-blank head shot once the imaginary bullet left the imaginary gun barrel.

Pierce’s head evaporated, his body lurching backward into the cloud of red, and skidding on its fine grey suit coat across the suddenly slick floor. Bucky’s headache evaporated too, leaving him soaring on a cloud of endorphins and righteous, elated bloodlust. He shot the doctors next, and then, though his restraints made it tricky, he shot their computers too, laughing all the while.

He was still laughing – no, be honest, he was cackling – when Natalia finally came in and plucked the glasses off his face. “Bet that felt good,” she observed, dismissing the carnage with a click of the remote.

“You have no idea,” Bucky gurgled, and reluctantly surrendered the toy gun when she held out her hand for it.

“I have some idea,” she countered, bracing him by his good shoulder as the vibranium restraints suddenly clicked open and stopped holding him upright on the bench. “After all, we tested this on my triggers before we put you through it. Here, wipe your face.”

He accepted the handkerchief and put it to use, unsurprised when it came away bloody yet again. “Suck as bad?” he asked, running a mental checklist and discovering to his relief that he hadn’t pissed himself this time.

She shrugged. “It’s not a contest, James,” she said as she turned away, essentially admitting that yes, it had. “Come on. Let’s get you into the tank before the migraine hits.”

“No, let’s just go get Steve instead,” Bucky replied.

“What?” Natalia said, turning in the doorway.

“What?!” Princess Shuri yelled, bolting into the room under the arm of her bodyguard. “Are you crazy? I haven’t even analyzed the brain scans! And your replacement arm isn’t anywhere near ready!”

“Don’t need two arms for this,” Bucky told her, wishing he could think of a polite way to tell the kid to pipe down a bit and stop making his head throb.

“Don’t be stupid James,” Natalia replied, “You’ve only cleared the words in English once, and even the successful runs trigger the migraine. You won’t be fit to travel for at least a few hours.”

“Once is enough, I can feel the difference – you know I can,” he came back, determined, “And I can sleep the headache out on the flight to Transia, but _you,_ ” he pointed at the impassive redhead whose poker face told him everything, “are worried. Or you wouldn’t have been trying to raise your teammates every time we took a break for the last two days. You don’t know if Steve’s okay, but you know he isn’t safe where he is, so...” Bucky spread his hand wide and mimed a jet lifting off, “we should go and get him. Him, and the others, soon as we can.”

“Sergeant Barnes-”

“Princess,” Bucky cut the girl off, “I appreciate what you’ve done, and I appreciate what you’re offering, and I would really like to take advantage of that offer once this is all done with, but...” he fixed her with his best ‘calm reason’ face – the one with the best batting average against Steve’s stubborn ass, not so coincidentally, “In the history of Steve Rogers, there have been only two people who could get him to lie the fuck down and take it easy, pardon my language, when he’s been banged up. One of those two died in 1929. The other one’s sitting right here, wasting time arguing with you two over whether he’s fit to go and make Steve Rogers lie the fuck down and take it easy, or not.”

The girl’s bodyguard snorted a laugh. “Well… he’s not wrong, Highness.”

Betrayed, the Princess rounded them all up with a glare. “All right! You can go and get him,” she allowed, pretending that was her call to make, “but you will come back afterward, so I can _finish_ repairing your brain damage, and fit the arm to you properly.”

“I don’t-” Bucky began.

She ignored him. “And you,” she fixed Romanoff with an accusing finger this time, “Bring Captain Rogers back as well, when you come.”

Natalia blinked, thrown. “All right… but why?”

“Because if he’s still injured, as you both seem sure he must be, we can help him here better than anywhere else,” she said, and her glare carried some backchannel message to her bodyguard as she added, “And it would be good for my Brother to see what a _pain_ working with a bad patient who relies too much on his super powers can be!”

~* Wundagore Mountain, Transia *~  
~* Steve Rogers *~

“Found him, Tony.”

And in that instant, Steve was awake.

He’d have liked to claim ‘awake and ready to defend himself’ but his first, sharp intake of breath, and the stabbing, strangling, cramp that slapped it down put lie to that notion altogether. He didn’t even manage a groan, just a pathetic, cloudy wheeze as the War Machine lifted the dark roof of the world away, and let icy air and white light come blasting in.

“Morning, Cap,” Rhodes said, flipping up his face mask as he tossed away the pine branches Steve had apparently been hiding under. “Had an exciting night, huh?”

Steve shivered up onto his elbows in the gritty needle thatch, feeling his broken ribs grind as he did so. “Where…?” he began, then caught a glimpse of himself and switched to the more important question. “Why’m I naked?”

Rhodes grinned, dusting pitch and snow from his gauntlets with great, clanging claps. “You’re about a hundred yards away from the President of Transia’s hunting cabin, to answer your first question,” he said, “As for the second, I’m gonna guess it has something to do with the aforementioned exciting night.”

Then he stood upright, and made a show of tapping his comm channel to the team frequency. “Rhodes to Rebel base. If someone in there’s headed my direction, tell em they should grab a blanket and a pair of boots, cause there’s a whole lotta au naturel goin’ on out here just now.” 

Steve finally managed that groan then, and in consideration of who-knew-how-many broken ribs, let himself carefully back down to the ground. He was naked in the woods, filthy with mud (and that _was_ mud. It was definitely mud. Maybe a little fur here and there, but mostly just mud, damn it!) He was sporting a different set of injuries now than the last ones he remembered having – the soreness in of his sundered, healing belly replaced with the more familiar internal grind of his ribs, and, perhaps most appallingly of all considering how little food he’d been able to keep down over the past few days, he now found himself not hungry in the least.

Rhodes hunkered down, apparently finished with his impromptu Star Wars moment. “So I figure you got five minutes or less before the cavalry makes it down here,” he said, offering his hand with a warmth in his eyes that belied the circumstances of their last parting, “You wanna lie there and wait for them to get here, or can you stand?”

“I can stand,” Steve said, and took his hand to pull himself to his feet.

He could, as it turned out, _not_ stand.

~*~

They brought a blanket down the hill, then lashed together several of the pine branches that had been ripped from the trees around where Steve had gone to ground, and rigged a stretcher to carry him back up to the cabin. All the while ignoring Steve’s insistence that they could just bundle him up in it, throw him over someone’s shoulder and get the whole thing over with. What was a high pain tolerance good for, after all, if not for cutting short these kinds of dithering, he asked.

Which was when Sam informed him that if Steve didn’t shut his pie hole, he would damned well find something in Babka Dynya’s bag of tricks to put him to sleep for a week, so help him, and no, Steve wasn’t to look to Wanda for rescue, because she would help Sam read the damn labels!

Which was when Tony offered to put FRIDAY to the task, in case she could do the translation quicker.

Which was when Rhodes revealed that he’d brought a whole new medkit with him – surgical grade, with all the team-tailored sedatives and anesthesia that SHIELD and Dr. Banner had developed, so that all it would take would be a syringe or two of ‘Goodnight, Sweet Captain,’ (yes, really; it apparently said so on the label,) and the whole problem would be solved.

And by then, of course, they had pretty much gotten the stretcher assembled, and Steve was cold, and wanted a wash and a drink of water, and figured that letting them have their way would get him both quicker than anything else. So he relented. Grudgingly.

He did make sure they knew, however, as Wanda used her power to lift him onto the scratchy, lumpy stretcher, that there would be absolutely no sponge baths of any kind when they got back to the lodge. Broken ribs and pelvis or no, on that point, he was ready to fight them all. 

They all agreed to his condition; Sam laughingly, Wanda blushingly, Tony with a comical show of reluctance, and Rhodes with plain relief.

Then they picked him up and marched him up back up the hill again, like Jack with his broken crown: Jill and the pail of water nowhere to be seen.

~*~

“You’re putting me in the basement?” Steve asked when the team carried him toward entirely the wrong set of stairs. “Why are you putting me in the basement? What’s wrong with the room upstairs?”

“Well, since you can’t be trusted with a window...” Tony griped back, but Rhodes cut him off.

“This stage of infection you’ll do better with earth around you, Cap,” he said. Then in answer to Steve’s baffled look, gave a half-shrug and added, “I got wolf in the family. Not like your buddies outside or anything, but close enough that my people know some things.”

“What kind of things?” Steve wasn’t sure, even as he asked the question, that he wanted the inevitable answer. Still, curiosity was at least a distraction from the low, aching grind of bone on bone in his chest and hips as they jostled him down another set of stairs. The walls around them went from smooth, bare concrete to stacked stone masonry as they descended, moss and mineral deposits glistening like rare gems on the mortar chink between the rough stones.

“Things like; it’s not unheard of for someone to pull off a partial transformation like you did last night, and still throw the active infection off in the end,” he replied as they finally, _finally_ leveled the stretcher out between them and headed toward the open, lighted doorway to the room that seemed to take up half of the excavated space. “And that the smell of earth and stone have a calming, centering effect on folks at your stage of inculation, especially if we can keep the smell of other lycanthropes from triggering your aggression instincts.”

“Aggression insti...” Steve began, incensed until the rest of the sentence made it through his pain-haze. Then, “Lycanthropes…?” he sighed, not quite able to make himself sound surprised. It was his life, after all; lycanthropes would hardly be the weirdest thing in it. Even if one of them was him.

“Believe me, I hear you,” Tony piped up again as they eased the stretcher through the door, and into what could only be a containment vault, complete with a ceiling shower across from the bed, toilet hole beside the drain, and a massive iron safe in the corner beside the massive iron door. “And I am _not_ a fan of this particular breach of the laws of thermodynamics-” Sam made a coughing noise that sounded suspiciously like ‘Hulk’, and Tony served him back a filthy look. “ _However_ ,” and here, he turned the stinkeye Steve’s way, “since you ditched your tracker in the bed, and I was the one who had to spend all night looking for you, I-”

“But the Serum,” Steve interrupted, craning to catch Sam’s eye, “It’s supposed to prevent me getting infected with anything? Why isn’t the serum fighting this off?”

“I… was curious about that too,” Tony finished, as if that had been his point all along.

“Beats me,” Sam shrugged, looking distinctly uncomfortable as he motioned the armored men to bring the stretcher to the bed. “Best guess I got is it’s a first-contact situation. Serum’s never had to deal with anything like lycanthropy before, so it’s taking some time to get a grip on it.”

“Like hell it hasn’t,” Steve protested, bracing for pain as Sam leaned in and grabbed the blanket under him with both hands, “There were vamps all over Europe in ‘45. The Wehrmacht was fulla blood suckers, and I got bit at least twice my first year on the front. That’s literally why I asked for neck armor in my uniform…” he realized only then that the others were all staring, open mouthed and appalled. “What?”

Tony recovered first, shifting his grip on the stretcher uncomfortably. “My dad never mentioned… um… vampires?”

Steve sighed. “Closest Howard got to the front was at parachute altitude, Tony, and he never took much of an interest in anything that wasn’t a machine he could take apart, or a dame he could have a good time with. We probably told him, he probably didn’t listen.”

Wanda shook her head, swore softly, and flexed her fingers to help Sam shift Steve more gently onto the bed. “That explains ‘walk it off’, I guess.”

“That was just a pep talk,” Steve protested through clenched teeth as his weight settled into the mattress and his sore bones objected the change. “My point is, I never got sick after the vamps bit me, so why would I be getting sick from when the...” he made himself say it, “werewolves did?”

“Can’t say I know, Cap,” Rhodes supplied, tipping the stretcher upright against the wall now Steve was off it, “Vamps aren’t my area of expertise. But I can tell you that you don’t ever wanna tell a Morphothrope that you think them and Vampires are the same kinda thing. Not if you don’t want a beat down on your hands.”

“Morphothrope?” Tony yelped in outrage as Steve translated the Greek in his head “There’s more than one _kind_?”

Rhodes smiled like butter wouldn’t melt on him. “More than twenty kinds, Tones. It’s just thanks to Hollywood, wolves are the ones most folk have heard of.”

“I have questions,” Tony told him, leveling a hard stare at his friend as his armor retreated like origami into a tidy pile of metal in the corner. “So. Many. Questions.”

“Ask ‘em on your own time,” the Colonel replied, turning toward the door with the air of a man who had been suited up far longer than he liked, and was more than ready to shuck his kit now. “I didn’t spend three hours on the phone with my great aunt Vangie just to get her ideas on housekeeping and décor. We got _steps_ to take before moonrise if we want to keep that other pack out of Cap’s range till he can shake this. I hope this place has more than one shovel.”

“Wait,” Steve grabbed, but missed Sam’s arm as he turned to follow, “You’re just gonna lock me in down here by myself?”

“Course not,” Rhodes countered, already outside the door, “Tony’s gonna stay with you.”

Steve blinked. “He is?”

“He is?” Tony echoed, eyes cutting quick and alarmed between them.

“You are,” Sam confirmed, turning just shy of the door after Wanda went through it. “Help Cap get cleaned up. We’ll bring down some breakfast, and then you can both get some sleep.” And there, he nodded to the other cot, which Steve hadn’t seen in the shadow of the safe. “Since, as you keep reminding us, you were out all night searching, it’s clear you need it.”

“I,” Tony dithered, “what?”

“Someone familiar needs to stay with him, Tones,” Rhodes put in gleefully from the hallway, “Vangie was pretty clear about that. We still don’t know for sure the serum can throw this, and pack bonding instincts can make the difference between a wolf and a monster at this stage.”

“But I,” Still dithering, but oddly not moving for the door, “That’s-”

“That still sounds an awful lot like house arrest,” Steve gritted, pushing his elbows under himself despite the pain.

“Quarantine,” Sam corrected primly on his way out the door. “Only reasonable, since you’re incubating a saliva borne, infectious pathogen right now.”

“Excuse me,” Tony put in, raising his hand as if he’d ever once waited for permission to speak in his life.

“Soft quarantine,” Sam amended, “Until the fever breaks and we know what’s what. So for now, just clean up, rest up, and keep your saliva to yourselves.” 

Then he pulled the door shut with a gentle thud that felt every bit as ominous as a clang would have been.

~* Sam Wilson *~

“How they doin’?” Rhodes asked when Sam came back up from dropping off the sandwiches twenty minutes later.

“Stark’s asleep, Rogers is pretending to be,” Sam answered, settling uneasily into the chair beside the security office door. “He’s worrying, sulking, or embarrassed that Stark pushed the beds together before he crashed out. Anybody’s guess which.”

“Mm,” Rhodes gave back, eyes glued to the split screen fast forward of the footage the security cameras had caught last night, “Tony sleeps for shit if he can’t hear someone else breathing. I wouldn’t worry.”

_I’m not worried,_ Sam thought, _Not about Stark, anyway._ Aloud, he only asked, “Where’d Wanda get to?”

“Went to check the cameras,” Rhodes answered. “The coverage is for shit on these tapes. Nothing aimed at the yard caught anything significant except for this one of Tony’s up on the roof line,” He pointed to a window, considerably clearer than the others, but too far away to give any better sightline on the fight that had gone down in the yard. “There’s no way Widow set up this array.”

“Mm,” Sam agreed, lacing his fingers together and pretending to watch the screen.

Silence reigned for a few moments, until the yard camera caught the bloody ending of the black wolf, the pack’s retreat, and Cap’s pursuit. Then Rhodes pressed pause on the lot, and sat back with a sigh. “You wanna say it, Wilson?” he asked, not looking around, “Or you wanna wait till a problem blows up later, and just add this one to it then?”

“Why are you here?” Sam didn’t even pretend to be coy. “Don’t get me wrong,” he held up a placating hand to the look Rhodes finally did turn on him, “I’m glad to have your help, and you’re the only one who seems to know what to expect out of these…” he waved a hand at the paused screen in lieu of choosing a noun. “But last we met, you were trying real hard to get us locked up, and I need to know-”

“You need to know I’m not going to hand you over to Ross as soon as Cap’s out of the woods.” Sam appreciated how Rhodes didn’t make a question out of it.

“Right.” Sam chinned up into the challenge, not willing to even imagine feeling shame for asking. It was a damn shame that he even _had_ to ask, but that shame was on the Accords, and the assholes who’d rammed them through, not on him, and not on Rhodes either. “Stark, I can read – he ain’t ever been hard. You though? You made your position plain last year, and all this?” he waved a hand, taking in the lodge, the yard, the postage-stamp country at war with its own worse self, and them, pinned down within it. “This is way, way outside that position.”

There, finally, Rhodes sighed, looked down and nodded. “Yes, it is.”

“So what changed?”

It was a long moment before the answer came. Sam was content to let it gestate undisturbed, watching it form up in the line of Rhodes’ shoulders, the flex and give of the tendons in his neck, the flinch of his jaw and steady, careful clasp of his hands in his lap. When Rhodes finally spoke the words, Sam wasn’t surprised by them at all.

“Everybody in the Service knows why Thunderbolt Ross hasn’t been given a field command since 2005, right?”

Sam nodded. General Ross was the Army’s poster boy for ‘abusive command resulting in heavy loss of ordnance and personnel, and way-too-many civilian casualties.’ It was an open point of debate among several officers’ circles just whom at the Pentagon the General had by the short and curlies, because there was no other way he could have avoided court martial for any of six or seven very splashy-in-the-bad-way engagements over the years, medal of honor or no.

Some folks even laid the Harlem Rampage right at his feet.

“When he brought the Accords in,” Rhodes went on, “I looked right past him. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I was thinking about how to make the UN not panic every time we needed to step up and fix something.” He glanced up, caught Sam’s eye with a solid glare, “And at heart, they’re right. We _need_ to be working with the governments of the world, not around them.”

Sam pursed his lips, and managed only just to keep himself from mentioning HYDRA, the WSC, and the previous Secretary of Defense, who would all have loved to get a leash like the Accords on the Avengers. He didn’t need to say it though; Rhodes read it right off his face, and he nodded.

“Yeah, and that’s why the checks and balances needed to go both ways. Which they don’t. We weren’t given time to realize that. Hell, I’m not sure any of us had time to even read through the whole thing before they were telling us to sign it.”

“Steve did,” Sam answered. “On the flight to London for Carter’s funeral. He couldn’t sleep.”

Rhodes nodded. “Well, what I did get to read of it, it seemed shaky, and there were some things that didn’t ring right, but I figured those things wouldn’t make it through debate.”

“Only there was no debate.”

“There was no debate.” Rhodes nodded. “They signed it like it was. Even though there are things in it that the World Court condemns as war crimes, they signed it.” He shook his head, then turned the chair and fixed Sam with a level stare. “I’ve had bad orders before, Wilson. I’ve had to walk the line between my conscience and the mission objective, and I figured with some time for things to calm down, cooler heads could prevail.”

Sam tilted his head and prompted, “But?”

His lips pulled sideways in a wry smile. “But I wasn’t expecting to have to arrest y’all within 12 hours of the signing, for one.” Sam bit back a smile of his own, and waved for him to continue. “And I wasn’t expecting Ross to escalate so fast that if we didn’t try and grab you in Leipzig, he was gonna be sending troops after you. And you know Ross’s reputation; it wouldn’t have been a couple of squads, and their orders wouldn’t have been all that specific about live capture. Going after you guys had all the hallmarks of a Thunderbolt Massacre. I didn’t want that. Not for you, and not for the boys he’d have sent after you.”

“I didn’t learn until a few months later what you all were even trying to do,” he said, rocking the desk chair back with a smile, “and I don’t mind admitting it right here and right now, Sam; I wouldn’t have wanted to tell General Ross that there were five more live super soldiers waiting on ice in Siberia either. Not with his record. But my name’s still on the Accords, and I’ve got 25 years invested in this career, so I do my best to play inside the lines, and work with Stark Industries’ lawyers to try and convince the UN to make some changes on the Q.T.”

And Sam had to nod. It fit what he’d wanted to believe of the man, despite his loyalty to the Corps, and lawful good, Paladin demeanor. But it didn’t really answer his question, did it?

Sam stretched, cracked his neck, and posed it again. “So does all of that mean that me and Wanda will have to be ready to disappear Cap’s Most Wanted ass as soon as all...” he waved vaguely at the security monitor, which had shifted its view back to real time, and now showed a much more complete coverage of the yard, road, and outbuildings. “All that business is handled, to keep you from arresting him?”

Rhodes snorted. “Wanda’s the one with the Most-Wanted title, in case you’re curious, and Romanoff after her. Cap’s actually pretty far down the list.” He cast a glance at the screens and sighed. “But no, all that business… that’s not anything I can tell an outsider.”

Sam blinked. “You told us.”

“You’re in it now,” he shrugged. “You faced the pack. You saw Cap’s wounds, and his change. Even if he throws the fever off, it’ll leave its mark on him. You’ll be – we’ll be his pack from here on out. That makes you all insiders to it now. And I know some clans who are _not_ gonna be all that comfortable with that if it happens.”

“What, we ain’t good enough for them?” Sam grinned against his rising nerves, and Rhodes smirked knowingly.

“We’re all way too high profile for them, more like. Morphothropes ain’t none of any government’s business, Sam. That’s one thing that’s pretty much a common understanding between all their types. They don’t want to be turned into any army’s attack monsters, and so they keep low down, they self-govern, and they take care not to draw the notice of the International Press.”

“Except for President Russoff and most of his cabinet, it seems,” Wanda said, startling them both as she turned up in the doorway like a ghost in a stolen fur coat, “I remember seeing him on the news all the time back when we lived in Novi Grod. And there had been rumors of the lupescu coming across the Transian mountains to eat bad little children since before I was born.”

“Yeah well,” Rhodes coughed, almost managing to cover the way he’d almost come around swinging, “From what I’ve seen on these tapes, the Russoff pack ain’t like other Clans in a lotta ways. Which is where the shovels come in. Did you find shovels, I hope?”

“Better,” she smirked, “I found an excavator attachment for the tractor in the barn. But there aren’t any bodies left out there to bury anymore. Something dragged all of them off sometime last night.”

“Someth...” Sam choked, then shook his head. “Aw now, that ain’t right.”

“Nothin’ around here’s right,” Rhodes agreed, standing with a brisk slap of his knees, “but the digging wasn’t for graves anyway, so I’m gonna go see what it’ll take to get that tractor running.” He headed for the hall, as if Sam and Wanda both weren’t drifting, baffled along in his wake. “You two can get a head start on the pongee sticks if you want in the meantime. I figure we’re gonna need at least fifty.”

~* Steve Rogers *~

“You weren’t really going to quit instead of signing the Accords, were you?” Tony asked into the darkness, nearly two hours after Steve had assumed he’d gone to sleep.

Startled out of his own brooding, the truth was out of Steve’s mouth before the words formed up properly in his head. “Well yeah.”

He cut a glance Tony’s way, and found himself the focus of an eerily fixed stare. “Really?” Tony asked, “Because I figured you were just using your public image as leverage.”

“Leverage...” Steve repeated, feeling depressed with the idea already. “You sure you wanna talk about this right now, Tony?”

Tony shrugged, rolled up onto his side, and wadded the pillow under his cheek so he could stare at Steve without turning his neck. “I got nothing better to do. Why; you got a hot date waiting or something?”

“Sleeping?” Steve suggested, mild as he could manage, “Sleeping would be better to do, wouldn’t it? I distinctly remember you complaining that you were up all night?”

“You were up all night too,” Tony parried, eyes still fixed on Steve’s, still wide and dark and heavy in the gloom, barely lit by the standby LEDs on Tony’s phone and tablet. “And now you’re evading the question, which, you should know, just makes me wanna find out why.”

“It’s because I’m in pain,” Steve bit back, “And I’m frustrated, and I’m damned well _useless_!”

“You’re not-”

“I’m stuck in this bed! Benched and on by back and waiting for the next damned disaster! _And_ we’re practically locked in a vault together, _and_ I’m not exactly in my best ever mood, and the last time we tried to talk about any of this stuff, we literally came to blows!” Steve finished at a considerably higher volume than he’d intended. He grimaced, prepared to apologize for his foul temper, but Tony was just… nodding?

“And you don’t wanna do that again.” Thank God Tony had the grace not to make that a question, so all Steve had to do was close his eyes and shake his head. Then a sharp nudge to Steve’s shoulder rattled a gasp out of him, and when he glared a warning, Tony was smiling back at him. “So let’s not do that again,” he said, like it was just that easy. “Let’s try the other thing. The… whatsitcalled. Talking? Yeah. Let’s try that.”

Steve snorted, amused despite himself. “Can you remember the last time you and I were in a room together for more than half an hour and didn’t wind up fighting?”

Tony shrugged, still somehow unruffled. “Can you remember a time we were in a room together for more than half an hour and both trying _not_ to fight?”

He shifted, wedged his arm under the pillow, eyes unblinking and vast, pulling Steve’s gaze in and pinning it quietly down. “I thought I lost you, Steve,” he said, “Not just pissed you off, or made you hate me, or drove you away, I thought you were…” Tony drew a shaky breath, and rubbed the red skin of his neck. “Gone. Forever. Irretrievable, unforgivable, utterly beyond the reach of closure of every kind, and that...”

“Tony,” Steve whispered, wishing his healing ribs would let him roll to face the man, “I’m okay. I’ll be-”

“And then last night I thought I lost you again,” Tony pushed on, relentless in this strange, unlikely vulnerability, “I wasn’t sure how many pieces we were gonna find you in, if we found you at all. Did you know you expressed the tracker chip before you went out the window?”

Puzzled, Steve shook his head, and then froze as Tony leaned close to brush his hand behind Steve’s ear, where that tiny, hard chip he’d never quite gotten used to had rested for years. Tony’s fingers didn’t even catch on a scab there now as they ghosted along the ridge of bone. It felt like Steve’s every fine hair was lifting to meet that touch. “Sam found the chip in the linens when we were moving the bed down here,” Tony said, voice small without its shell of sarcasm, “So I didn’t even know if I would find enough of you to bury, if the worst happened.”

Then Tony took his hand back to himself suddenly, and that dark gaze fixed on Steve’s again. His voice was a brighter, more familiar thing as he finished with a shrug, “That put things in perspective, you know? What’s a grudge worth when you could maybe have a friend instead?”

_So was I._

Steve had to fight to keep that awful flash of memory away from his face. He made himself grin, even though he was pretty sure Tony couldn’t see quite as clearly in the dark as Steve could, and made a show of sighing. “I dunno, Tony. In my day fellas who were friends didn’t really _do_ talking. We just sorta grunted and punched each other a lot. Used semaphore for the complicated details...”

“Which explains so much about my dad,” Tony put in, feinting a poke at Steve’s ribs that they both knew better than to let connect. “C’mon, Pepper tells me there’s this thing you can do where you use words to communicate concepts directly? I hear it’s supposed to work wonders.”

“Sounds like hooey to me,” Steve conceded. “Nothing can be that easy.”

And Tony grinned, all insouciance. “What, you suddenly scared of a challenge?”

Steve huffed, putting up a front of annoyance so he wouldn’t laugh. “You’re not as clever as you think you are, you know?”

“Yes I am,” Tony laughed back, and suddenly everything felt more familiar. He tucked up his pillow again, and settled into his interrogation. “So for the record, you were _not_ holding out for a better deal on the Accords because even the UN would have to think twice about the plan if Captain America refused to sign?”

Steve felt his mouth pull to the side. “I guess that’s how things work in the boardroom, huh?”

“And on every political stage in the world,” Tony agreed, “Except the one you’re on, apparently. So-”

“No. Doing something like that didn’t even occur to me.” Steve shook his head, remembering conversations with Sam on the flight to London, and with Sharon after the funeral was done. Remembering how the grief of losing Peggy, finally and irretrievably, had put so much of his life into a grim, grey sort of perspective. “I… I really was done. I _wanted_ to be done. Thought maybe the Accords was a sign that the world was...” he sighed, scratched idly at the healing itch beneath his skin, “ready to let me stop. But then the bombing happened at the UN, and then I found out they were planning to shoot Bucky on sight.” He shook his head, tried to steady the shake from his voice, the tremble from his jaw. “No investigation, no trial, no conviction; just an execution.”

Tony blinked; careful, so careful. “That doesn’t seem-”

“I know,” Steve rolled over him, “They didn’t know what they were going up against. How could they? None of them saw just how many combat trained SHIELD personnel he went through on Insight Day, when HYDRA still had control of him. I knew. If it really had been him who set that bomb, I knew what he could do, and I knew he would be able to kill every soldier they threw at him, and every civilian who got into the crossfire, without breaking a sweat.”

And God, it hurt, worse than broken, grinding bones, worse than opened guts and migraine fever spikes to talk about Bucky – his own Bucky that way. But at the time, in the moment of just not knowing, it had felt worse. “I also knew I was possibly the only person in the world who might be able to bring him in without that kind of death toll. So...” Steve turned his head, watched Tony’s face as he admitted, “So I interfered. But I really, _really_ wish I could have just retired instead.”

Tony looked somewhat hurt, eyes fiercely fixed on Steve’s face as he spoke. Steve had to wonder if it was hearing about Bucky that caused it, or if Tony’s memory was serving up the same bitter, icy dish as Steve’s just then.

_When I see a situation headed south, I can’t just stand by and do nothing. Sometimes I wish I could._

_No you don’t._

_… No… I don’t._

When Tony spoke at last though, it was another memory he echoed instead. “You said you were home. When I left the compound upstate, you said... it was where you belonged.”

Steve looked away, scanned the cracks in the ceiling for some kind of cypher, and of course found none. “Someplace had to be, I guess,” he said, uncomfortable, “Where else – who else did I have?” He glanced over just before Tony managed to scrub the appalled look from his face, and tried to soften the thrust, “I’d wanted out since before I moved to DC, actually. It’s just I just didn’t have anywhere else to go, or anything at all to do to make myself useful. So when Fury asked me to pitch in at SHIELD, I didn’t say no.”

Tony’s frown twisted to the side. “Steve, I’ve seen the investment portfolio my dad set up in your name. I know you’re not poor. You could have retired anytime and done _nothing_ for a solid decade and not had to worry about income.”

He shook his head. “It was never about income, Tony, just like Iron Man isn’t about profit for you.”

Tony snorted. “I’d be a moron if it was – you don’t know how much I spend on those suits.”

“And I probably don’t want to,” Steve agreed, “But the point is, you do it because… because you want to help. Even if it costs you a lot, even if you get hurt, you want to help, and you mostly _can_ help, so you take it on. What makes you think it’s any different for me?”

“Because you wanted to retire?” Tony bit back, all acid before he checked his tone, “And this whole thing with Pepper and me taking a break happened because I _didn’t_ want to retire.”

Steve looked at the ceiling again, thinking through the words carefully. 

“All my life,” he offered at last, “I wanted to be strong enough to stand up and fight back for the little guy. When the war came, and I got the chance to do it, that’s what I did… that’s what I became: a soldier, like my Dad was, like a million other Joes, all doing their duty to humanity.” Steve shook his head, and gingerly brought his arm up to pillow his head. “It was an easy groove to get stuck in,” he admitted. “It was a wakeup call for me the day I went to meet Sam at the VA, and he brought up the idea that I didn’t necessarily need to be a soldier anymore.”

Tony snorted. “That sounds like Wilson.”

“He asked what made _me_ happy.” And now it was Steve who had to forcibly check his tone, “And I realized that it had been so long since I’d _been_ happy, I just didn’t know.” He sighed, deliberately vexing his ribs with a deeper breath than he really should have taken. “And then after Ultron, you were leaving, and Thor was leaving, and Barton was leaving. I had to stay. Get the new team up to speed. And of course, by then I _really_ didn’t have anyplace else to go, or anyone else to go to.”

Silence reigned for a long moment. Then, “What about Barnes?” Tony asked, voice carefully scrubbed clean of emotion. And Steve had half expected that, but it hurt all the same.

He shook his head. “Not then. I wouldn’t have had to spend two years looking for him if I’d had Bucky after DC. Only clue I had to go on was him pulling me out of the Potomac instead of letting me drown. I knew he hadn’t gone back to HYDRA after the crash, but that’s not the same as knowing I’d be welcome anywhere in his life.”

He heard Tony swallow, then the rustle of the pillow and creak of old springs as he flopped over onto his back. “I didn’t know that,” Tony said eventually, “That you felt so alone. You never let… you’re such a damned stoic, how were we supposed to-”

“Tony,” Steve cut him off before the complicated emotion he could hear rattling in the man’s voice could find its way into the old, familiar channels of spite and anger. “I hardly knew it myself. That’s how I was raised – no point complaining when something wasn’t how you wanted. You fixed it if you could, and if you couldn’t, you just coped with it and kept on with what needed doing.”

A rib shifted inside Steve’s chest and he winced, but then gave a sigh as the pain of the break began to ease. Fever or no, it seemed the Serum might finally be back on the job. “And it’s not like any of you knew me in happier times anyway,” he went on, “Why should you have guessed I was anything other than the sour, uptight, joykiller everyone expected when SHIELD thawed me out? None of you knew the Steve Rogers-”

“The Steve Rogers that Bucky Barnes knew.”

“I…” Steve hated how dry and thick his throat sounded when he swallowed. “Yeah.”

“So why didn’t you tell me you were looking for him?” Tony demanded suddenly, too loud, too bright in the heavy darkness. He shoved his laced hands behind his head abruptly, as if a show of insouciance would make the question less fraught.

“Tony,” Steve began.

“No, I’m not talking about the other thing,” Tony cut him off with a single glance, hot and quick in the darkness, “I don’t want to talk about why you didn’t tell me _that_. Not yet, anyway. I just want to know why you didn’t ask me to help you find him. Were you protecting him from me even then?”

“Thought you didn’t want to talk about that,” Steve muttered, so used to the old, familiar weight of grief and regret that he couldn’t summon up any real resentment.

“I don’t.” And the words were absolute against the quiet around them. “All that shit with him, and Hydra, and my parents – that’s between us: him and me. You don’t belong in that conversation.” Here, he cut Steve a heavy glare, “As you knew when you put yourself between us in Siberia to begin with.”

“Tony, you were-” Steve started to roll over, ribs bedamned, but Tony put up a forbidding hand, more effective than pain and a hard shove at keeping him flat.

“Yeah, I was,” he said, palm still raised to the air, “but I’ve had a nap and a snack since then, so don’t worry about it. Also…” he put his hand down, somehow managing to look defiant and contrite at once, “Romanoff sent me some operational specs for some of the… devices HYDRA used on him. Some of the procedures; schematics, chemistry, conditioning. That shit’s hard to look at from the best headspace, but it kinda put a big crack right through my rage-goggles, if you must know.”

“Well I’m glad to hear that,” Wanda said from the doorway, half a second before she flicked the lights on. “Take it from me, rage-goggles really mess with your perspective.”

“Wanda,” Steve groaned, throwing an arm over his face as Tony burrowed cursing under the pillow. “Why would you-” but then the smell of food came to him; rich, red, and spicy from the tray in her hands. His stomach snarled emphatically over the protest.

“First, to check you’re both still alive,” she said, passing the bowl to Steve, then plucking Tony’s pillow away as she straightened up, “And second, to let this one know that Viz is about to have to deal with an invasion from the Secretary of State at the Avengers Compound if Stark doesn’t get somewhere neutral and take the prick’s calls.”

“Wanda,” Steve chided as Tony sat up in wide eyed alarm and scrambled for his phone.

She rolled her eyes. “Language, I know, but he _is_!”

“He most certainly is not,” Steve replied primly after an appreciative sip of his dinner, “Pricks are useful, and often rather pleasant. Secretary Ross is more like an infected rectal pimple with frighteningly good Pentagon connections,”

Tony made a spluttering noise at that, and leveled a glare at them both. “That’s it, you’re both fired. Off the team,” he added when Wanda snickered, “I’m keeping your jerseys.”

“You’re keeping Colonel Rhodes’ jersey as well then,” she answered, archly sweet, “I told him first when Viz’s message came through, but he said he had ‘better things to do today than run interference with the Brass for Tony Stark again’.”

Steve finished the bowl, which had only been half full to begin with so that he could drink from it without having to sit up, and passed it back to Wanda hopefully. “I’d take it on for you,” he offered to Tony as the girl read his unspoken request and ladled more soup into it, “But I really don’t think General Ross would take my call.”

“Oh, he’d take it all right,” Tony grumbled, scrubbing a hand through his hair and standing at last, “You just wouldn’t like what he’d do with it, so let’s just allow that whole brilliant notion to die the death it deserves.” He huddled low, shoving feet into boots, then scooped up his tablet and sunglasses and clomped toward the door, and the armor just visible beyond it – a silent sentinel in hot rod red.

“I’ve got shit for signal anywhere on this Godforsaken mountain, so I’m gonna have to get some altitude to handle this,” he said as the metal blossomed, then furled closed around him. “You...” he leveled Steve with a commanding finger, “Save me some of that soup.”


	6. Retention

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sneaking, spying, and the one who stays.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art of AMAZING by Defiler_Wyrm.

~* Wundagore Mountain, Transia *~  
~* Bucky Barnes *~

“So how much of that did you hear?” Natalia asked, kicking the bed support to let Bucky know that now they were on the ground, continuing to feign sleep wasn’t an option.

He indulged in a stretch and yawn just to spite her. “Heard enough,” he said, unstrapping the flight restraint and sitting up, “to know your safe souse isn’t very safe if Iron Man found it last week, and unknown hostiles attacked it last night.” Natalia’s scowl deepened, but Bucky didn’t give her room to interrupt. “And if your team’s still there despite all that, it means Steve’s a lot worse off than anybody wants to admit. That about cover it?”

“About,” she grudged with a shrug neither of them found convincing. “The rest is all semantics and negotiation. So I’ll go in first to gauge tempers and run interference, and you get a start unloading all that.” she waved a hand at the Stark Industries crates all stacked behind their transport netting.

Which was perfect, actually. So perfect that Bucky had to pull a sidelong grimace and glance pointedly at the empty left sleeve of his shirt to conceal his approval of that plan.

Natalia rolled her eyes and smirked. “You’ll manage, I’m sure. Just don’t break anything.”

“Oh no, of course not,” Bucky grumbled, “Wouldn’t want Mister Stark to get angry with me.” He went to begin unhooking the transport net, deeply aware of her wary hesitation, but not sure whether it was because she knew what had happened in Siberia and was looking for words to reassure him, or just that she didn’t trust his easy compliance.

Natalia huffed a sigh and left before he had quite reached a conclusion.

He learned, once he ventured out to reconnoiter, that the Quinjet stood in a cleared, snow-filled meadow behind a sprawling alpine lodge. Someone had obviously leveled the area sometime long in the past, because as soon as meadow gave way to the towering pine forest (which it did with unnatural abruptness) there was no more flat ground to be seen anywhere.

That, more than everything else, let Bucky know just how rich this place’s legal owner had to be. And that, more than everything else, gave him some hope that he might just be able to pull this off. Because rich people did like their toys. They liked them fast, with big engines, and tough chassis, even when they never intended to put said toys to a fraction of the performance capacity they’d been designed for. 

And sure enough, behind the house there was a barn. And inside said barn was a tractor, several bucket, plow, and excavator attachments, a cistern of what had to be diesel fuel. And tucked cheekily into the stalls where surely no livestock had ever taken a dump, was a selection of motorcycles, snowmobiles, ATVs, and one beautiful, gleamingly new snow cat, with an ignition he could have wired up in his sleep.

No large piles of local currency or cache of weapons stored in it though. That was a shame.

Still, from what Bucky had overheard, the purple android guy hadn’t come in with the other Avengers. If Iron Man was still off-premises handling something political, that left just Not-Iron Man, who, if he couldn’t be evaded, might possibly be reasoned with if it came to running. Not ideal, but at least it wasn’t HYDRA.

Bucky needed more intel – accurate intel, direct from the source, for preference. He needed to see Steve, and work out how he was really doing in there. Only then would Bucky be able to start planning their escape for real.

The lodge had no curtains – another conceit of the ultra wealthy there; they never seemed worried about ostentation, or sightlines. Bucky could see Natalia in the main room, either arguing, or negotiating emphatically with her teammates. Which was good; it meant they’d be sorting things out for awhile, and she’d be too distracted to get into his way.

They’d moved Steve ‘for security and defensibility reasons’ – and oh how the Natalia’s voice had dripped scorn when she’d repeated those words on the call. That had to mean underground. Place like this was bound to have cellars, sub-cellars, wine cellars, root cellars, kinky dungeon cellars, non-kinky dungeon cellars, and at least one allegedly-bomb-proof paranoia vault built in while they were leveling the ground for the visible structure. And when it came to securing a super soldier, as HYDRA had established, underground was always where you had to start.

He made his way along the back of the barn, and from there to the back of the house, where he could see several window frames peeking over the snowline at ground level. One of those would surely be big enough for him to squeeze through, especially now he didn’t have that massive metal arm attached to his shoulder. And if the word _disarmed_ happened to skate like a shiver across his mind, he could ignore it. It was only the cold, and he’d been far, far colder, and far less dangerous in his time, after all.

The first three windows weren’t worth digging out. They were small enough that even Stevie at his skinniest couldn’t have wriggled through. The fourth though, that one showed promise.

He had just begun clearing the snow away when the hair on the back of his neck let him know he was being watched. The snow hadn’t crunched or creaked, and there was no wind to sough the trees and cover an enemy’s approach, but Bucky still whirled in place, borrowed shovel hefted like a bludgeon to face his foe…

Who leapt backward on hairy orange paws, fluffy tail lashing as it hissed at Bucky’s sudden regard.

“Cat,” Bucky sighed, easing his weapon down as the animal settled just out of arm’s reach, ears still back, tail thudding against its flanks, “It’s just a fuckin’ cat. Jesus, Barnes.”

The cat made a throaty, warbling noise that sounded a lot like “Nooooouuu,” but which clearly translated to, _‘Touch me, and I will eat your whole face, thumb-monkey.’_ But since it made no move to come at him, Bucky figured it was probably all bluster.

Bucky huffed a laugh as he flipped the shovel to a better digging grip. “You keep telling yourself that, kitty,” he told it, and bent to get back to work on the snow. The cat was one of the biggest he could remember seeing, and if it lived out here in the mountains of Transia, it was probably not your average pussycat, but it was still just a fluffy orange cat. Which for his purposes, was about a thousand times more convenient than, say, a brace of guard dogs would have been.

He’d always hated it when places like this had guard dogs.

Making quick work of the snow, Bucky revealed a nice sized exit window, and a well-stocked basement pantry behind it. He could even see a conveniently placed counter top inside that would let him climb down to the floor instead of jumping. But no sooner had he knelt to jimmy the window’s latch, than a stealthy, sliding pressure against his supporting leg brought him around swinging again.

He only just managed to stop himself from slapping the hell out of the cat, which had apparently decided he was worth a belated greeting. It was now flattened defensively against the ground, and glaring daggers at him though. _Just a damned cat!_ he reminded himself as his heart slowed from its adrenaline charge.

“Sorry Puss,” he told it, voice gentled, offering his hand in truce, “Just didn’t realize you were there...”

In retrospect, he probably should have known better.

And while the cat couldn’t have known what Bucky’s instinctive reaction to being clawed bloody would be, it probably should have known better too.

“Little fucker,” Bucky growled around his bleeding thumb as the cat tumbled to a stop against the next window down. He’d pulled his blow just in time, but the clap back had still knocked it tumbling. It fetched up against the stone foundations, rattled, covered with snow, puffed up about three times bigger than it had been a moment before, and decidedly ungrateful for the effort Bucky had taken not to burn one of its lives.

It hunched low, ears pinned and tail lashing, making a sound Bucky hadn’t known cats that small could actually make, and Bucky realized sinkingly that maybe that life was still on the table after all. Because he could clearly see the cat measuring the range, vector, and wind shear between itself and his face. He steeled himself to catch it, hoping to throw it farther, but more gently, across the yard, and maybe win himself enough time to get through the window before it could come at him again.

Then another window dropped open, and a curl of scarlet light looped out around the cat’s middle and scooped it thrashing out of sight. Bucky froze, strangely horrified on behalf of an animal he might have been about to kill. But instead of shrieking, he heard a girl laugh.

“ _There you are!_ ” she said, and it took Bucky a second to recognize the Sokovian. “ _How do you keep getting out, you monster? Your Babka would be so sad if we let you get eaten by wolves!”_

Before Bucky had quite decided what level of evasion he should take, the brown-eyed girl from the airport battle in Leipzig put her head out of the window and gave him a smile. “Sorry about Little Brother, Bucky,” she said over the creature’s grumbles as she cuddled it right to her shoulder – far closer to her face than Bucky thought could possibly be safe, “He’s kind of territorial.”

“Um,” Bucky said, trying not to look at the shovel he’d dropped in the snow pile behind him. “Oh?”

“Don’t worry though,” she beamed, stroking the cat’s back as if its massive tail wasn’t trying to bruise her ribs “he’ll warm up to you when he figures out you’re not trying to take Steve anywhere. Do you want to see him?”

“He’s...” Bucky nodded at her shoulder, “kind of right there?”

She laughed. “No, I mean Steve. That’s who you were looking for, wasn’t it?” He tried not to look caught out, but her grin turned canny. “I thought you might want to avoid the welcoming party, so I came down here to wait for you.” A scarlet curl of power bled off her fingers, crept along the wall and swung the window beside him open. 

Bucky tried not to flinch – an invitation was an invitation. Still, “They all still up front then?”

She nodded. “They’re going over last night’s security footage and arguing about politics. They’ll be at it awhile. Come on; I’ll show you where he is.” She dropped the window shut on the cat’s last complaints.

 _She’s an ally,_ Bucky told himself, gripping the window’s frame and stepping through, _She fought for me in Leipzig. Steve trusts her._ And though that wasn’t enough to calm his twisting nerves, if going along with her would get him to Steve’s side faster, Bucky would damned well do it.

The girl met him outside the pantry, brushing orange fur from her shirt. “Wanda Maximoff,” she told him, offering her hand. “Pleased to properly meet you, Mr. Barnes.”

It was a strange moment for him, taking that hand he’d watched her use to toss cars through the air like toy blocks. Did she ever wish it was gone, the way he had with HYDRA’s metal arm? If she did, it didn’t show in her handshake, which was solid and warm, and quite nice against his chilled fingers.

“Call me Bucky,” he told her, remembering the shape of his old, girl-charming smile. She gave him a knowing stare, but her cheeks pinked up, pleased and flattered despite it. He gave her a bashful shrug. “Sorry. Habit?”

“Hmm,” she mused, then turned to lead the way into the cellar complex, “I can see why you two get along...”

Following her, Bucky realized he’d been right about this place; it was a labyrinth below ground. He’d have spent hours clearing corners and picking locked doors down here. The fake storage shelves over the second set of stairs alone might have taken him an hour to find. 

With Wanda’s help though, he came to Steve’s ‘secure and defensible’ sickroom in minutes. It was a little less ‘high tech panic room’ and more ‘ye olde counting house’ than Bucky had thought, but the massive, reinforced steel door was more or less exactly what he’d expected. And Steve…

Behind the door, in a bed just barely large enough for him, Steve lay asleep; pale as a moth in the hallway light; skin damp and hair dark with fever sweat, sheets in restless tangles around his legs. The smell of fever filled the room with an acrid, metallic tang – sweat, spicy food, and worry overlaid the smell, but couldn’t drown it out. Even from across the room, Bucky could see scars, ragged and red across Steve’s belly and chest. Shiny too, as if they hadn’t quite committed to healing up, and thought they might just revert to open, bloody wounds any time.

He grunted in his sleep, a tiny, pained noise as he shifted away from the light, and Bucky shook off his appalled horror. “Oh, Stevie,” he breathed, easing to his side in the gloom, “What the hell did you do?”

~* Natasha Romanoff *~

If she’d seen the video on the internet, Natasha would have dismissed it as a hoax without a second thought.

It was grainy, blurry. The camera angle was all wrong. The hard white shine of the moon over the snowy yard had overwhelmed the camera’s polarizing filter correction, rendering the very best image they had – three whole frames that weren’t hopelessly blurred or pixelated – a barely discernible mess. She’d seen clearer Bigfoot photos. 

There was something inside Natasha that desperately wanted to scoff at the image. That wasn’t Steve. That couldn’t be Steve, not even if they’d put him in a stupid furry suit. There should have been a padded thickness at the knee, a toe-tip shoe concealed in a stocky shank below, and a cartoonishly big, padded paw if it was a suit. But the creature on the tape had none of the toy-animal softness a suit would have conveyed.

Its hips were narrow and jagged under the strain of its unnaturally upright sprint. Its legs were thick with muscle above the knees but whittled down to tendon and bone beneath the high ankle’s backward hook. And the feet… the foot she could clearly see spread wide under the creature’s weight, was half the size of the shoes she’d stolen for Steve when they’d been on the run in DC.

 _I should never have left them._

She crushed the thought at once. She had kept a promise, taking the book straight to Wakanda. Steve had been counting on her to do exactly what she’d done. He’d been wounded – _infected_ – already by the time they’d gotten her onto the jet, after all, and if she’d stayed behind, they’d be two surly invalids now for the rest to cover and protect.

That didn’t make it easier to look at the thing’s face. No, she had to begin thinking of it as Steve, didn’t she? It shouldn’t be any harder than looking at the Hulk and seeing Bruce’s gentle features hiding inside, should it? And yet… and yet.

It wasn’t so much the unnatural shape of its… of his face; a canine thrust of nose and jaw over a wide, high primate forehead, with ears too long for one, too short for the other pinned back in a bristling shag of fur as it charged after its foe. It wasn’t even the ragged bristle of teeth in that wide mouth, or the slashing arc of his taloned hands as he ran. It was the blood, really.

It… He… Steve was covered in it. That, more than everything else, was proof of just how much trouble Steve was in. Because Natasha knew how Steve Rogers fought – she’d been sparring with him since 2012, and she’d seen him take on enough pitched odds to know the whole of his range. He was a brawler, he was brutal and efficient and acrobatic, and he could throw a grown man fifty yards when he was really worked up, but he was not _savage_.

Whatever he had killed – and there was far too much blood on him in that picture for the blood’s owner to have survived – he’d held it close as it died. And in that frozen, feral, digital moment, it looked like he had really enjoyed killing it.

A small, trilling sort of chirp broke her focus, and Natasha looked away from the monitor about two seconds before the biggest, fluffiest ginger cat she’d ever seen hopped up onto the desk to block her view completely. Blinking, she held her breath, and counted herself down from the edge of an unfortunate reaction as the cat picked a spot on the cluttered desk and sprawled to begin gnawing on half a loaf of _kulich_ Natasha had last glimpsed in the kitchen.

“ _Give me some of that,_ ” she said, guessing Russian might be a language he had heard before as she reached to pinch a bite off the end. He swatted and growled at her, of course, but let her get away with her morsel. She’d always had a way with cats, and she made sure to conspicuously enjoy her stolen treat until he offered a grudging purr of welcome. She didn’t pet the cat – not yet – but they both knew it was only a matter of time before he’d be drowsing in her lap.

In light of the morning’s discoveries, Natasha found that thought deeply comforting.

Through the open door, Natasha could hear Wanda’s voice, pitched low and calm as she read something aloud to the others. Sam replied with a query, and Rhodes supplied a longer, somewhat rambling response. None of them sounded upset, alarmed, or frightened. Weary, yes, but from what they’d told her – shown her – of the night before, that was not surprising. There was no undercurrent of strain or distrust behind their words, and no apparent grudges playing out on the sidelines of Steve’s potential downfall.

That too was a relief. It had been mortifying to learn that Stark had located their hideout so soon after she and the others had left. Natasha had chosen the Wundagore retreat specifically because of the area’s disruptive magnetic fields, and unapproachable terrain. Foiling Stark’s satellite technology hadn’t been her primary reason behind the choice, but it had been in the top ten.

It had taken her weeks to drag even part of what happened in Siberia out of Steve. Natasha remembered well enough what Stark had been like when he’d been pinned under Damocles’ palladium sword. The billionaire’s forgiveness, like his temper, was a mercurial thing of flash decisions and stubborn contradictions, and Natasha had known damned well that Tony Stark was _not_ a complication they could afford to deal with on this op.

The Red Book of Winter was too important, and despite his front of stoic determination, Steve was too fragile. And yet, somehow, here they all were.

Except for Tony, of course, who had apparently gone into low earth orbit to make a phone call about eight hours ago, and was – the cat’s ears twitched toward the window, and the rising whine of descending repulsors in the yard outside. Together they turned to watch Iron Man make his iconic landing in two feet of snow.

Well, it had to happen sometime, she decided, reaching past the cat to turn the monitor off. A sitrep on the political balance of Transia’s revolution would be a valuable thing to have, given that they were trapped in the country until it either blew over, or Steve recovered enough that they could take him somewhere less turbulent.

Natasha just hoped that wherever it was that James had gotten himself to, he would stay there out of sight until she had a chance to talk Stark around to accepting his presence without violence.

“ _Think it’ll work?_ ” she asked the cat in Russian as the metal boots thudded two, three, four steps onto the porch, then shifted abruptly to an unarmored tread. The cat gave her a skeptical look, one waft of its enormous tail, and then returned his attention to finishing the bread as the front door opened with a bang.

“Luuucyy, I’m hooOOOOoome!” Stark called, and Natasha sighed. Stark in mania mode was harder to predict, but at least more manageable than his anxiety spirals. “And boy, have we got some ‘splainin to do!”

A chair in the dining area creaked. “That bad?” Rhodes asked warily.

“Let’s just say if Pepper had been that mad, I’d have been paying for at least three new pair of shoes, apology flowers, and a week in the Caribbean,” Stark answered as he crossed the room, “But it was Ross, so I just let him yell on mute till he got tired, and had FRIDAY give me the Cliff’s Notes.”

That had to be Sam snickering, Natasha decided. Wanda never thought anything about General Ross was funny, and Rhodes wasn’t the snickering type.

“So.” There was a soft, flat sort of thud as Stark dropped something on the table. “The US didn’t ‘officially’” – oh, those air quotes could be heard a mile away – “have many ‘interests’ in Transia before all this went down. Basically it was considered a pass-through ally.”

“Like Sokovia.” That was Wanda, leaden with judgment. Of them all, she had the most right to it.

“So what,” Sam put in over the awkward pause, “President Russoff just turned a blind eye to US meddling so long as he got a cut?”

“Standard local warlord/tin-pot dictator kinda deal from what I can tell,” Stark agreed, outrage bleeding through his brittle cheer, “Which is why our buddy Ross is worried. Apparently news has gotten out that President Russoff was assassinated, and the US Secretary of State thinks it’s ‘very important’ to make sure that it’s someone from Russoff’s camp who winds up on top of the heap once the screaming’s all done.”

More than one chair squeaked, more than one listener groaned.

“I was hoping that news would take longer to get out,” Sam grumbled. A string popped, cardboard rustled, and when he spoke again, he was chewing angrily. “Didn’t they say in Dragorin that the army was shutting down the news sites and radio stations?”

“They said reporters were being arrested,” Wanda answered, “And the airports were being closed and blockaded, but-”

“But it turns out there’s at least like five different factions to this revolution,” Tony answered, chewing as well, “And they’re all blaming Russoff’s murder on each other, or the CIA, or the Avengers, or HYDRA, or – you’ll like this one, kid, – on SHIELD and a rogue cell of Sokovian kill squad members.”

“What?!”

“Right?” Tony rolled right over Wanda’s outrage. “Russoff’s cabinet, what’s left of it, can’t give Ross or anybody else a clear idea of who’s in charge either. Apparently Russoff’s younger brother, the Minister of Finance, looked like he might be set to take over, but he and his entire bodyguard went missing last night, and nobody in the loyalist camp seems to know where they’ve gone.”

There was a heavy pause, and Natasha could hear the metric weight of dread increasing as they all considered the attack that had happened here last night. What the cameras had shown; what they had not shown; what they could not have possibly shown.

The orange cat looked up with a trill, amber eyes tracking through the open doorway to the kitchen. Then he stood, stretched, and shook breadcrumbs from his ruff before jumping – by way of Natasha’s thighs – to the floor. He was surprisingly heavy, given how much of his volume had to be fur.

“So the rebels are losing then,” Wanda ventured after a moment, not noticing the cat’s silent beeline into the kitchen.

“Well, I’m sure that’s what Ross would like to call true,” Tony answered, not even pretending to be cheerful about it now, “But FRIDAY got some better data while I was away from the black hole of signal death that is this fucking mountain. All the cities are currently under the control of one rebel group or another. The police are either surrendering, or being rounded up into their own jails, and it looks like at least two of the rebel groups are squaring up to start bombing each other’s cities, so...” Then suddenly the brittle cheer was back, as if Stark had flicked a switch. “Oh hey look, that’s Cap’s assassin buddy raiding the fridge while we’re all talking politics, isn’t it?” he mused, “So this is a thing we’re doing now?”

There was a beat of silence, then chair legs screamed, and boots clattered on the floors. Natasha snatched her bag from the desk as the cat yowled a warning, and Barnes backed it up in a voice as calm and threatening as a mountain slope just seconds before avalanche. 

“Yes,” he said, “Yes it is.”

“I brought your BARF back, Stark,” Natasha said, taking note of the tableau as she clacked her boot heels across the boards. Stark and Barnes faced each other across the long, open space, chins up, hands empty. Rhodes’ gun lay on the table, seven inches from his hand, but he was clearly watching Stark for cues. Sam wasn’t even pretending this would go well, and had both his guns in hand while he tried to track everyone in the room. Wanda had put her back to Barnes though, and clearly had Stark in her own crosshairs, which was perhaps the most intriguing reaction of them all. 

“Thanks for the loan,” Natasha finished, lobbing the glasses at his head.

He turned, flailing to catch them before they shattered, the look of impending mayhem abruptly abruptly traded for comic outrage. “Do you mind?” he yelped, juggling the visual interface unit from the air as Natasha shouldered past Sam to get to the pastry box on the table, “Those are worth more than a whole you!”

“Bill me,” she answered coolly. “Ooh, piroshki. Did you get apricot too, or just cherry?”

“Mine was plum.” Wanda was, of course, the first to get her footing back, and she caught Natasha’s eye with a grateful smile as she pointed out the stack.

“Naw, you want one of the raspberry ones,” Sam corrected, guns once more holstered as he picked his chair up from the floor and turned it to sit. “Those are awesome.”

“I think mine was apricot,” Rhodes offered with a quick, contrite glance in Tony’s direction as he sat. “Tony usually just gets an assortment when he gets a sweet tooth on.”

“I hate you all,” Stark preened, stalking off to set the BARF glasses on the mantle next to the little burner phones Steve had asked Natasha to get for him in Prague. “And don’t eat all the chocolate ones, I want at least one of those.”

And just like that, they were all on side again. Truce in place, grudges on hold, good faith carefully, carefully creeping out of cover. It was almost too good to be true.

“Could I…?” Barnes stepped around the kitchen island, an empty plate in his hand, his eyes still fixed warily on Stark. “Could I take a few of those down to Steve?”

“No.” Stark’s growl was as fake as his scowl, but Barnes still flinched from it. Until Stark turned and jabbed a finger at a second, smaller box on the counter. “These are for us. That walking stomach has a box all his own.” He flicked a querying glance at Rhodey and added, “No chocolate, right?”

“Yes chocolate,” Rhodes smirked back, picking one out of the box and dropping it onto Barnes’ plate, “Especially at this time of the moon. You don’t want him cranky. So is Steve awake,” he added to Barnes, “or are you just being proactive?”

“He’s awake,” Barnes answered with a shrug. “Hungry, achy, bored, and pissy; ‘bout like usual when he’s laid up like this. He’ll feel a lot better once the moon rises and this last fever breaks. That’ll go easier if I can get him to eat before it happens.” He turned to collect the second pastry box, and so missed the exchange of baffled glances they all shared behind his back.

Predictably, it was Tony who found his words first. “So, Steve gave you the whole skinny? On what, um, happened? To him?” he asked, hands in pockets, voice as casual as he could make it.

Barnes gave him a look, all eyebrow. “You’re kidding, right? Steve? Talking about an injury instead of pretending he’s just fine?”

“ _Can_ IGetAWitness,” Sam coughed, and Wanda snickered.

“He’s got a point.”

“All right, settle down,” Tony chided, scathing them all with a glance, “So if Steve didn’t tell you about the lycanthropy tango, where did-”

Barnes cut him off with a scoff. “You realize the infection process is pretty much the same for every inception, don’t you? First the bite; then fever, seizures, fever, partial shift, then you get a break before the last fever, which hits on the night of the full moon.” He tipped a nod toward the windows, and the broad daylight outside them. “Which is tonight.”

“Is… is that how it…?” Stark cut a glance to Rhodes, who neither broke his stare at Barnes, nor seemed to realize his mouth was open as he nodded.

Natasha set her pastry down. “I feel like you should explain that, James,” she suggested.

“Well you see, sometimes the Moon comes out of the Earth’s shadow,” he began, deadpan but for a lurking, gleeful mischief he probably thought nobody could see. He dropped it when she leveled her best ‘I will end you and enjoy it’ glare at him. “I guess the Dyatlov Pass Incident was probably before your time, wasn’t it?” he asked with a sheepish shrug.

In a flash, Wilson was out of his chair again. “Whoa,” he said, patting the air as if to settle it, “Whoa whoa whoa. You mean that thing with the Russian hikers in the Ural Mountains? With the tongue, and the radiation, and exploded tents and-” He paused, taking note of the stares, and then shrugged defiantly. “What? Cryptids are the only weird thing we’re allowed to be curious about now? Everyone in this room has literally punched an alien or a killer robot at least once!”

“And you!” He turned back to Barnes with a demanding finger. “You’re telling me right now that was HYDRA that killed those hikers? Or Werewolves? Or what?”

Bucky sighed, and put the box back down.

“HYDRA had a base in Kholat Syakhl,” he said, all trace of laughter gone from his face. “This was still early on for me, they hadn’t perfected the ch-” he swallowed hard, “The w-wipes yet. And they were just working on Cryo st-st-storage. So… anyway, they used to bring in prisoners from the gulag across the pass when they had testing to do. Especially when they expected it to be fatal.”

“So that hasn’t changed,” Wanda observed, dry as old bones.

Barnes flicked a glance at her, then at Natasha, and steeled himself to continue. “Once they brought a girl from the camp. Maybe seventeen years old. I think she was the girlfriend of a writer or something, but I could be wrong. They took her to the chemistry division for testing, and that’s when they learned that she was also sometimes a bear.” Half the smile returned, brief and still joyless, to his lips. “It did not end well for anybody.”

Sam sat down slowly. “So the hikers in the pass were… what, in her way?”

Barnes shook his head and glanced at the floor. “Not hers. The Strike team they sent after her once she’d killed everyone in the lab and half the base command on her way out; the hikers were in _their_ way.” He glanced up earnest and almost pleading. “I heard the team talking about it when they came back in the next morning.”

“So why didn’t they send you with them?” Stark demanded, “I mean you’d have been the obvious choice for that kind of a job, right?”

Tony’s question had a definite edge to it, but to his credit, Barnes didn’t flinch. Instead, he just lifted the hem of his shirt up high to show the welter of scars that crossed his left chest, branching in five clear swipes from the seam where the metal arm had once met flesh.

“Because she’d already gone through me getting to the base commander, and they were busy trying to figure out whether they should try to reattach the arm, or just yank it the rest of the way off if I was dying.” he answered evenly. “I was one of about twenty that survived her mauling that day. Two weeks later, I was the _only_ one that survived the full moon.”

“Did it stick?” Rhodes had found his voice at last, and it was a very worried voice indeed. “Did you change into a bear?”

“No,” Barnes promised through his teeth, “HYDRA never could have kept me if I had.” 

Then he scooped the pastry box and plate into his hand, and turned back to the door Natasha guessed must lead down to the cellars. “I’m gonna take these to Steve,” he said, knocking it open with his boot. Then he left without a backward glance.

The cat spared them all one judging, amber stare, then bounded from the counter, and followed him down, slipping through the closing door with his tail held high. 

He didn’t seem in any hurry at all.

~* Wanda *~

Wanda didn’t see much point in hanging around for long after that.

The others, after a quick, fierce, and futile debate over whether it had been Barnes’ serum, or his cybernetic arm that had helped him throw off the infection, began digging into what if’s and wherefores of Steve’s chances, and the odds of another wolf pack attacking against whatever had attacked the wolves coming back. They were trying to guess odds around the corners none of them could predict, as if the Avenger best suited to that kind of planning weren’t downstairs, bored out of his mind and desperate for a distraction.

She didn’t bother mentioning that though. She’d been feeling a loneliness from Steve for months now; a longing deep and constant as the tireless engine that fueled his faith in humanity. Sometimes that thrum had worn Stark’s seeming; bruised and angry with regret. More often it had felt like Barnes; pale and smiling, distant as a star in his column of glass.

Now, at long last, Steve had them both back again – for certain very stingy values of the word ‘have’. Stark was here, and not trying to arrest Steve, and Barnes was here and not trying to run away, and the last thing Wanda wanted to do was ruin that. Especially given that all she had to offer in trade would be the inevitable, wrangling family meeting-and-strategy-session going on over piroshkis and the new server Stark thought would let FRIDAY reach him through Wundagore’s shroud of ringing silence. (She didn’t think the uplink would work all that well, and didn’t feel like watching Stark disappoint himself. He was exhausting when he was disappointed.)

And besides; Wanda had been out learning how to drive an excavator all morning, after having worried helplessly all the night before. Now that she’d eaten, however perfunctorily, she wanted a shower only slightly more than she wanted to fall over in a bed and chase oblivion for as long as the world would let her.

If she was supremely lucky, she might even get a whole hour of sleep before the next crisis hit.

~* Steve Rogers *~

“What the hell are you doing?”

Steve froze, heart racing guiltily, then shoved himself properly onto the bed and gave Bucky a defiant look. “I heard something.”

Bucky’s eyebrows went up at that, and Steve could tell that if he’d had two hands, one of them would have been braced on his hip. “You heard something under the bed?”

“No, I heard something in the other room,” Steve grumbled back, punching the pillows up higher behind him. “I was just hoping they mighta left me some pants under the bed, so I wouldn’t have to go investigate in my alltogether.”

“Now why would they do that if they wanted you to stay in bed and heal up?” Bucky wondered, all sarcasm as he came to Steve’s bedside. “It’s genius, really. Makes me wish I’d thoughta stealing all your clothes when you got sick back in Brooklyn.”

Steve just rolled his eyes at that, remembering perfectly well how Bucky had used to layer him in both their clothes, their coats, and all the blankets he could find or borrow when the fevers hit him hard in the winter. But when he opened his mouth to mention it, Bucky just shoved a pastry between his teeth. 

“As for your mystery sound,” he said while Steve chewed, “you’re in a big old house in the woods, Steve. One that goes unoccupied for months at a time, and is apparently left stocked up with food when the people leave. It was probably just rats.”

“Din’t smell li’ rats,” he managed around sweet bread and gooey chocolate.

Bucky smirked, then nudged the pastry box toward him so Steve could deal with the string and tape. “That’s ‘cause wild rats mostly just smell like old houses and basements. It’s only city rats that stink like you remember.”

Steve had to look away, so Bucky wouldn’t clock how that word hit him. He broke the string, tired of fumbling with the knot, but Bucky’s hand curled gently over his before he could go searching for the tape.

“I do remember, Steve,” he said, the same way he’d once said ‘ _It’s my draft letter, Steve,_ ’ and ‘ _They say she can’t go home, Steve,_ ’; said it like a tragedy, like a damn shame, but what could you do about it but shed your tear and get on with life? “It’s all mixed up, and… well, there’s a lot missing, and a lot don’t make sense yet, but I remember now.” He took a shaking breath, and Steve found he could take no more.

He turned his hand, caught Bucky’s tight, palm to palm, and then reached to turn his face upward, to search past the iron grey guilt and pain in those eyes, for the wintry blue of the boy Steve had never known how to give up on, even when he hadn’t known how to go on hoping either. “Bucky?” he breathed, not sure how to even ask.

Bucky’s watery smile answered it all the same. “I _remember_ , Stevie,” he murmured, leaning close to slant his lips like a benediction across Steve’s forehead; like a prayer across his cheek; and finally, like a confession across his lips.

Steve caught him close, fingers tight around the back of his neck before Bucky could even think of slipping away, and one of them – perhaps both of them – made a desperate, hungry sound as their mouths fit tight together. Three years’ worth of unspoken, unnecessary words blew away like ashes before that sound, and the urgent, wordless pleas that followed as Bucky pressed Steve’s fist back into the pillows and laid carefully down along his side.

“Stay,” Steve begged as Bucky’s mouth slid away, soft lips and hard teeth scraping his unshaven cheek as Bucky sought the taste of his ear, his neck, his shoulder, “Don’t leave, Buck. Please. Please don’t-”

“Shhh,” he breathed, hooking a leg over Steve’s, and not even trying to hide it as his erection pressed into Steve’s thigh. “I’m here, Stevie. I came back for you. Just for you.” Bucky freed his fingers from Steve’s grip, only to trail them through the sweat-damp tangles of Steve’s hair. “You’re the one who matters,” he promised, no trace of sarcasm to be found, “You think I’m here for anybody up there? Or out there? I came back for you.” He swallowed, holding Steve’s gaze like it took all his nerve to do it, but would kill him to look away. “Just like you came back for me.”

“Too late,” Steve moaned, unable to keep the words back, “I came back too-” Then Bucky bit his chest and he yelped.

“You _came_ ,” Bucky insisted, “In Romania. In Vienna. Anywhere you thought I might be after DC. Even when I didn’t make it easy, you kept coming back for me.” He kissed the place he’d bitten, his own beard prickly against Steve’s tender skin. “Hate to tell ya, Stevie, but you’re stuck with me now.”

Steve laughed, the healing ache of his ribs bringing tears to his eyes as he wrapped both arms around Bucky and held on tight. “Guess I’ll just have to make the best of it,” he said, weaving his fingers into Bucky’s hair and guiding his face back into kissing range. 

“You’re tough,” Buck smiled the words against the press of Steve’s kiss, “You’ll manage.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case anybody wants a FASCINATING rabbit hole to lose a day or two into, go out and research the Dyatlov Pass Incident for yourselves, because it actually happened. I mean, most likely, assassins, Werebears, and HYDRA probably weren't involved, but theories of what might have happened don't stop much short of that.


	7. Presentment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Patrols, dude soup, and finding the edges.

~* Wundagore Mountain, Transia *~  
~* Natasha Romanoff *~

Not long after Wanda had stolen away from the table, Natasha also excused herself and went to check on her cameras.

She’d constructed the security array expecting that some would fail, and others could be destroyed, and it was no great shock that it now needed adjustment. What she hadn’t expected, however, was that none of the overlapping coverage she’d created would _catch_ the saboteur subtly repositioning her cameras to allow him the ambush blinds and unseen corridors she had eliminated.

Whoever had done it had known this mountain, and the Presidential lodge very well indeed. Given that the owner of this lodge had, according to rumors and witnesses alike, been dead for a week, Natasha found the whole matter of the camera tampering deeply, and professionally disturbing.

There had been quite a lot of traffic in the woods around the lodge since the storm Clint had raced out of the country last week. It was difficult, now, to tell what had happened when. Still, she took her time with each camera; considered each boot- and paw-print, each scrape of bark, broken twig, and gouge in the frozen black soil below. Tried to assemble a pattern that might point her to the culprit, or might, at least, give her a clue as to the culprit’s species.

Eventually, lacking any clear conclusion, and getting cold in the thin mountain air, Natasha gave the exercise up up and get on with resetting the array. She added in a couple of special additions she’d brought from Wakanda, which she hoped might be unfamiliar enough to escape the saboteur’s notice, should he happen to come back before they could leave. She was just attaching the power source – A speck of blue vibranium, glowing like a star inside a slice of silicon no bigger than a grain of rice – when the first drone came buzzing through the trees at her.

Natasha dropped to the snow, rolled to the lea of a huge cedar, and came up with both her guns in hand as another came over the ridge from her left. She fired at the first drone as it rounded the tree, and the dinner plate sized machine abruptly broke into five smaller drones. These spread like a cloud of flies, and each beamed a targeting laser on her as the second, and then a third of the drones flanked her open sides.

“Stark,” she said, guessing, “You want to find out if these things’ shielding can take a direct hit from a widow’s bite?”

“They can, actually,” came Stark’s voice from up the hill, snow crunch footprints bringing it closer as the drones alighted, one by one, to the snow. “Well, most of them can. If you got a lucky guess and tagged the central processor you’d take out all the satellite units for that set, but the idea is for them to take a target down before they’d have time to make that kind of analysis.”

Natasha holstered her guns, breathed hot annoyance on her fingers, and waited for the genius to pick his way across the rocky slope of pine and ice. “Take them down how?” she asked as he drew near enough to pick one of the still-assembled units up off the snow and flip it over for an adjustment.

“Well, the ones I developed for tower security use tasers,” he said, not meeting her eye, “But they can be loaded with tranqs as well.”

“And these?” Natasha picked one of the small units up, noting that it wasn’t nearly heavy enough to be carrying bullets.

“Repulsors,” Tony answered, righting the large drone and tossing it into the air. Its rotors spun up at once, and it hovered for a moment as the other drones lifted off as well, then the whole cloud angled off toward the Lodge. “Cutting frequency, since I didn’t know what kind of drugs it would take to put a… werewolf down,” he said the word like it tasted bad, “I figured you guys would need all the extra firepower you could get.”

Natasha held onto her captive drone for only a second, impressed with its lift power, then let it go to join the others. “You guys’,” she repeated, watching the drone skip through the trees after its fellows. “Which is notably different from ‘we’.” She bent to pick up the camera’s battery from the snowbank and pretended she wasn’t watching Tony from the corner of her eye.

He stood quiet for a moment, face turned to the path his drones had taken, though his eyes’ focus was clearly much farther away. Then he sighed and scrubbed at the back of his neck. “Yeah, well I figured with Buckaroo Bearbait around to look after Cap, you guys wouldn’t much need me around.”

“Really?” Natasha demanded, dropping all pretense as she rounded on him. “After everything I sent you from that damned book, you still want to see Barnes dead?” It wasn’t an accusation she believed, but she was pretty sure it was one he needed to hear.

“I what?” Stark blanched, and just barely managed not to flinch. “No, that’s…” He rubbed at his neck again, then found his surety. “No, I don’t. Not particularly. It’s just… I was here for Steve because I thought he was hurt. And then I stayed because…” he cut a rather desperate glance toward the lodge, “Because Rhodey said he would need, um, pack around him. To stay, um, human, and.” He shrugged, looking almost as lost as he had on the night he’d expected to be his last birthday. “Well, there’s no closer pack for Steve than that guy who’s with him now, so…”

“So you’re leaving.” Natasha let the bluntness of the fact do its own heavy lifting, but couldn’t resist adding, “How unlike you to run away from your feelings, Stark.”

“I… my feelings?” And there went the outrage, neatly driving the lost little boy out of those eyes.

She shrugged and prodded deeper. “And the ten minute, awkwardly honest conversation it would take to lay all that angst and pathos to rest,” she said, then gave a dramatic shudder. “Terrifying. I can see why you’d rather go handle General Ross’s political errands instead.”

Stark’s lips pressed flat, annoyance taking over his glare as he clocked her teasing. “Hah very hah,” he said, bracing his hands on his hips. “No. Fuck that asshole. It’s just…” He stole another long look toward the lodge. “Steve’s…”

“Steve never put that damned phone down, you know,” Natasha said after the silence had run heartbeats long. “Not unless he was in the shower, or on an actual op.”

“I.” Stark blinked. “He…?”

“He didn’t sleep with it under the pillow, or on the nightstand,” she said, closing her new camera, and dusting the snow around it for cover, “He slept with it in his hand. He emptied an emergency compartment on his belt so he could always have a charger with him. So whatever you can’t figure out how to say? Steve’s been waiting all year to hear it.” She gave him a smirk with a heavy look over it. “Might want to think about not wasting your chances, huh?”

Stark held her gaze for a moment, then looked down. “I…,” he began, then, “he… I just… Barnes,” he finally managed with a sigh and a vague wave of his hand, “My folks. Siberia. That… fucking chair. It’s...” he swallowed hard, and stole a pleading look in her direction. “It’s a lot for me, you know?”

And it wasn’t sympathy that made her meet that look with a smile. “Trust me, Stark, it’s a lot for Barnes too.”

He scoffed then, because of course he did, and turned to begin climbing back up to the lodge’s leveled yard. “Trust you, Miss Rushman?” He called over his shoulder, voice ringing from the rocks around them. “I mean, have you MET you?”

“What’s that you say, Stark?” she called back, only half noting his retreat. The orange cat was out again, watching their exchange from atop a tumble of large rocks just up the slope. “‘Thank you for buying me more time with that hypospray, Natasha?’ Don’t mention it, Stark. No seriously. Don’t.” 

He barked a laugh, still climbing, but her attention was on the cat as it dismissed their conversation and began hopping down the rocks, utterly unbothered by the snow and ice. It paused to stretch up against a tree, clawing vigorously and shaking snow in great clumps off the draping branches above. Natasha swore as one of her cameras disappeared under the fresh, white powder. Then she started the awkward climb back up to where it now lay buried.

The cat was, perhaps wisely, gone by the time she arrived.

She dug the camera out of the snowbank, picked a new, higher position for it, and staked it down again in the shelter of a drooping fir which had already been jostled out of its snow load. Then she turned to choose a path back to the lodge that was both direct, and reasonably safe without actual climbing gear, and… stopped.

Because the cat’s tracks led straight back to a jutting cluster of boulders, but no farther. As if it had just appeared there, irrespective of Newton’s ideas about physical laws, and Einstein’s about the fourth dimension. Climbing carefully over the tumbled rocks, Natasha approached the cat’s vantage, and only once she stepped out onto the biggest stone did she spot the crevice hidden between them, and feel the air – cool, rather than cold, tasting of metal and dry earth against the backdrop of snow, cedar, and pine.

The crack was narrow – she wasn’t sure she’d be able to worm her way between the stones to get at it, let alone get through. Still, the draft was strong enough to make her sure that the passage behind the fall of stones had once been quite large, and probably fairly straight. Like a tunnel, maybe.

“The silver mines,” she murmured, tracing the edge of the largest boulder and wondering if nature had broken that long right angle into it, or had merely sheared all other signs of man’s hand away from the thing when it had collapsed. All the silver works in this area had been tapped out and shut down by the mid 1800’s, but it made sense that the bourgeois would hold onto the land, build their playgrounds over the earth’s picked pockets, and wait for the day when science might give them a way to wring out just a few more tons of wealth. 

That, at least, gave her an idea of how the cat kept getting out.

~* Wanda Maximoff *~

Wanda dreamed of earth and darkness.

A vast cave of ruddy stone, streaked through with veins of white crystal and black ore that shifted and flickered in the diffuse light of a single, small candle. Deep hollows cut into the patterned walls, like the niches of enormous Saints with gleaming, lantern eyes. Dozens of those ledges spiraled up into the vaulted space above her, watchful and vast in their shadows. She might have thought it a trick of the uncertain light – reflections on well-placed crystals, or glow worm clusters, but for the fact that occasionally, one of those massive, primal, staring Saints would… blink.

The light was too poor to see anything definite – just shape and shadow, and all those eyes giving back the scant glow with piqued interest. One of them shifted weightily behind her and she whirled, but caught nothing more than a fold of dark into dark, a grumbling huff, and a sense that the owner of those eyes could leap from its ledge and kill her almost without realizing it, were she to be enough in its way. 

The stone in Strucker’s scepter had felt like that a little, before Ultron had broken it out of its housing and tucked the glowing ember of gold into Vison’s third eye. Ultron himself had felt dangerous too, of course, but this sense of peril had none of his childish malice surrounding it. This was primal, pure, and savage.

_Where am I?_

She didn’t quite dare speak the question aloud. Similarly, she found herself a little afraid to summon the Red to her, as if that would be a challenge the watching Saints would not take kindly. There was a scrape of thin metal, and suddenly the diffuse light coalesced, throwing Wanda’s shadow like a sharp black carpet across the cave’s muddy floor. 

Then behind her, Babka Dynya began to sing.

Wanda spun on her heel, fingers crooked, the Red half a micron beneath her skin, fear only just leashed back from a show of threat she wouldn’t be able to take back. But the old woman didn’t look up from where she squatted beside a small, shallow pool. She mumbled, half chant, half song, all unintelligible as she scooped up handfuls of water and poured them into a pile of soft, ruddy dust like powdered clay between her bare feet.

“Babka Dynya?” Wanda whispered, crouching down to try and catch the old woman’s eyes. But her voice made no noise, and Dynya didn’t look up. She merely folded water into slip, into slurry, into a thick, sticky mud that clung to her skin like offal. And all the while, she sang that old, strange song; the notes wandering and eerie. Wanda found herself wondering whether she was singing to the Saints gathered above her head, or to the mud gathered between her red, red hands.

A knock on her bedroom door startled Wanda upright, a scream strangled in her throat, scarlet wreathing her fingers as she clawed the air.

“You okay in there?” Sam’s voice came through the door, weary and worried.

“Yes,” Wanda was quick to soothe, scraping her hair out of her face just before he opened the door and peeked in. “Fine. Why?”

His brow didn’t clear as he carefully searched her face. “You were talking in your sleep. Just thought I should check in, I case it was another nightmare.”

She flushed, remembering Berlin, sirens, and a hasty midnight evacuation from a cheap hotel with a brand new open-air skylight in one of its rooms. But then she made herself smile, and wave his worry away. “It’s fine. I was dreaming, but not about the Raft again, I promise. Did you need something?”

“Eighteen hours of sleep, a back rub, and a minigun nest on the southeast side of the roof?” he bid with a weary grin. “But barring that, I’m gonna take my turn at the shower and nap thing. Dude Soup’s on in the kitchen if you’re hungry,” he hooked his thumb toward the stairs. “It’s all calories and comfort, with only a nod toward nutrition, but I figure we’re due. Rhodes and Stark are on watch, Natasha’s looking for something in the basement, and Barnes is down making sure Steve doesn’t get any ideas about being useful. They might even have pants on, if you want to go down for a visit.”

“Pass,” Wanda snickered as he pushed off the door frame and headed off down the hall.

She indulged in a stretch, considered the odds of getting back to sleep again with the rich smell of cheese, bacon, and potato now invading her senses, and then discarded the notion. Her stomach remembered all too well what a good cook Rhodey was – his decadent creations far outshone even the most persistent nostalgia for the food she’d grown up with on the streets of Sokovia. If ‘Dude Soup’ was the one she thought she remembered, it would be gone all too quickly, and she didn’t want to miss out on her share.

She tossed back the blankets, reached for her boots, and then froze.

Her feet had been clean when she’d laid down to sleep; shower damp and pale. Now that the sun was lowering to gleam amber gold through the window though, there was no mistaking the state of her feet: dry now, but not clean at all. 

They were covered from sole to ankle in a talcum-fine, brick red, powdery dust.

~* James Rhodes *~

“What’s the plan?” Jim asked without looking up when Tony came back in the lodge.

The sound of boot and coat removal paused, then continued at a slower pace. “What’s what plan?” Honestly, why Tony still thought he could front with him after all these years was a mystery to Jim.

Now he did look up, in order to dish out the look that patent evasion deserved. “Whatever plan you’re considering that has you rushing to get started before you or anybody else can talk yourself out of it,” he said, enjoying the parade of alarm/guilt/annoyed defiance that rushed over his best friend’s face at the gentle call out. 

“I ain’t saying it’s automatically a bad plan or anything,” he soothed before the expression could find its way into Tony’s trademark Starcasm, “I just want a little warning so I can spin the fallout if I need to.” Because sometimes – damn Obadiah Stane to a ripe, rank hell – even after all these years, Tony still needed to be reminded that they were friends.

“I’m...” Tony fiddled with the zip of the borrowed parka for a moment, then turned to hang the thing on the coat tree. “You open that attachment I sent you yet?” he asked, brightly casual and falsely cheerful.

Jim glared. “Tones...”

And the hands came up. “It’s relevant, I promise,” he said, eyes flicking at the stairs, the office, and the basement door in the kitchen by turns. “Did you look at it?”

Jim sighed, then turned the monitor of the laptop so Tony could see. Maria Stark’s face charmed the camera from the top of her SHIELD dossier, but a significantly less beautiful photo of her appeared in the second window that was open over the first.

“It came through about ten minutes after you got the upconverter and encoder enabled, but FRIDAY was running diagnostics on her link and trying to stabilize the drones’ ping-back routines until about ten minutes ago,” he said, “So I’ve looked, yeah, but I haven’t done much close reading yet. Why don’t you get some of the soup and come tell me what I should be looking for.”

Tony opened his mouth to give some bullshit about not being hungry, but Jim leveled his best ‘Are you questioning my orders Cadet?’ look, and for once Tony decided to do as he was told. Jim took the opportunity to continue scanning the decrypted documents and translations of the photographed pages. It was grisly shit, no matter how you squinted, and not even Jim’s interrogation resistance training served as much of a buffer to the queasy sense of horrified sympathy and revulsion in his guts.

“So, um,” Tony called from the kitchen over the mild clatter of ladle and spoon, “Shouldn’t all this… animal protein of indeterminate origin maybe be in an oven, or some kind of a refrigeration unit or something instead of just sitting out on the counters?”

Jim smirked, grateful for the distraction. “It’s for Steve,” he said, scrolling on past some chemistry notes he knew he’d have to look more carefully at later, “And it’s thawing, so leave it alone.”

“Really?” Tony asked, steering wide around the pile of meat and bones, “I mean I know that super soldier metabolism runs hot when he’s healing up, but… that looks like it adds up to, half a cow there, more or less. Seems a bit excessive to me.”

“Metabolic load for a full morphological change is no joke, Tones,” Jim shrugged, pulling up the operation diagrams for HYDRA’s torture chair for closer review. “When newly changed wolves come up feral and violent right after their first moon, it’s usually because they’re starving and can’t think straight. They wouldn’t attack the nearest human if there was a pile of meat they didn’t have to chase down and kill right there for them. And,” he gave Tony’s shell-shocked expression a smirk as he kicked the chair out for him, “my great aunt Vangie tells me it’s important to start out as you mean to go on with moon wolves. Precedence matters, apparently. So we’re gonna make sure Cap eats as much as he can before moonrise, and we’re gonna be ready to feed him again if we have to, afterward.”

“So,” Tony sat in the chair, but carefully, as if half afraid it was gonna bite him. “I’m not sure whether I want to meet your great aunt or not.”

Jim laughed. “You already did, Tones. She was at our graduation. She was the one who straightened your collar so the hickeys wouldn’t show when your Dad was coming over with the Dean.” As expected, Tony’s eyes went wide, and he flushed pink across his cheeks. It never failed to baffle Jim, the way Tony could be mortified in past tense over a situation he’d brazened through without a lick of shame in the moment.

But before he could settle into the familiar, teasing mood between them, Tony’s eye skated over the laptop screen again, and blush and humor alike evaporated from his face. “So...” he sipped at the soup, then grimaced, blew on the soup, then remembered his spoon, dipped it, then blew on that, and then when Jim hadn’t guessed what his question was, put the spoon in his mouth and asked around it, “Barnes?”

Jim sighed and looked over at the laptop. “Yeah. I don’t know the details of what international law has to say about shit like...” he waved a hand at the diagram on his screen, “But I know torture, and long-term indoctrination when I see it. And I know some of the POW's that came back from North Korea after the war had a lot of deprogramming they had to get through to recover from what was done to them in those camps.”

Tony stared at him, spoon still parked between his lips, clearly waiting. Jim sighed, and paged down a bit more. “Romanoff said they used the BARF to work on Barnes, so he wouldn’t be an immediate threat when she brought him here, but I gotta say...” he stopped scrolling when Maria’s smiling picture came up to the top of the screen again. “I have questions about how you’re handling this right now.”

There. That was the key. Tony’s facade of having it together, everything being fine, just fine, we’re all fine here, how are you, cracked and folded in around the spoon he drew from his mouth and dropped back into the soup. “I don’t know how I’m handling it, Rhodey,” Tony muttered, stirring, stirring, stirring as if the key to his feelings might rise up out of the bowl, “I mean… you saw what… what they looked like after he… after they died. And I know it wasn’t like he wanted to go out and do it, but...”

“Tones,” Jim put a hand over Tony’s, stopped that endless stirring before it could slosh beer and cheese chowder all over the upconverter and kick them all back to the internet dark ages again. “I get it. It’s one thing to read statistics on a sniper’s kill count when you don’t know the people he was sent to kill, but this...” he waved a hand at Maria’s picture, “I knew her too. Her and your Dad. I wasn’t close with them or anything, but they’re real people to me. And yeah, Barnes did kill them.”

“But there’s nobody in the whole world who stands a better chance of reminding Cap of the reasons why he needs to stay human,” Tony put in with a wry twist. “And there’s like two hundred or more other next-of-kin out there in the world who I’m sure would like to know just where to find this guy too. Only...”

“Yeah,” Jim agreed, minimizing the window with a sigh, “But. Taking out the sniper to clear a battlefield approach makes sense. Going after that sniper once the war is over though… it might satisfy a wish for revenge, but it doesn’t punish the commander that defined that sniper’s free fire range and told him to keep it empty.”

Tony’s face twisted up again, like it always did when someone he respected handed him a truth he didn’t want to accept, but knew better than to reject. Jim sat back in his chair, considering while Tony hid behind his soup again.

“I figure it’s like Afghanistan,” he said at last, just as Tony put the full spoon into his mouth. Then he grinned at the challenging eyebrow and elaborated, “The Ten Rings were supposed to kill you on that convoy. They made another choice, and so did you, and here we are today. But you have to ask – what if they’d just taken Obie’s money and done nothing? What if they’d just let you get away? Would Obie have given up, d’you think? Or would he have tried again as soon as he thought it was safe?”

Tony’s face paled, as it always did when Obadiah Stane’s ghost came into the conversation, and he rubbed at his sternum as if the ache there was present tense. But he still nodded. “I… He did try again.”

“Because he wanted the Arc Reactor,” Jim agreed, “But think about if you’d come home from Afghanistan without it – if you’d come home not really any different than you were when you went. How long would he have waited to try and kill you again? A mugging gone bad, an accidental overdose, a poisoning,” Jim fought the urge to snarl at the memory of just how many opportunities they had all given Stane, just how many ways they could have lost Tony if greed hadn’t made the older man careless, “He brought you food and liquor all the time, man. All the time.”

Tony shivered, covered his face with both hands, and then scrubbed the remembered betrayal back into whatever box he kept it in. “Barnes could have let them go,” he began.

“And whoever HYDRA had in charge of plan B would still have killed them,” Jim finished. “Because for something as important as a viable super soldier serum? You know goddamned good and well that they had at least six ranks of fallback plans in place before your folks even got into the car.”

Tony closed his eyes, took a deep, rattling breath, and blew it out again. “I know. It’s just...”

Jim put a hand over his, where it lay knotted on the tabletop. “I know.” One eye cracked open to level a skeptical glare Jim’s way, and he met it with a smile. “He’s here. He was involved. Temptation to scapegoat is a big one, believe me I understand. And it’s not like I’m sayin’ you need to forgive the guy and trade hugs or anything, but...” he shrugged, and nudged Tony’s bowl at him pointedly. “Well, you did ask for my perspective.”

“Yeah, I know.” Tony whined, scooping up his bowl and commencing to shovel the soup into his mouth at a pace any other cook would have found insulting, but which Jim knew to be Tony’s normal reaction to food presented to him in an informal setting. “Romanoff fot ee shouh ferry fhuh fhahchit foo.” He swallowed then, and made a face as he scraped the bowl. “Why does everybody’s perspective involve _feelings_ though?”

“It’s a conspiracy, Tony,” Jim answered, standing from the table with a roll of his eyes, “And you should definitely take it personally. And once you’ve finished making your tin foil hat, you might wanna take some of that soup downstairs to Cap.”

“Why would I want to do that?” Tony complained, as expected, craning his head to shout after Jim as he headed for the kitchen.

“Because otherwise I’ve got to take it down,” Jim replied, picking up a towel from the counter by the stove and laying it over his shoulder. “And that will leave you with nothing to do but wash all these dishes Wilson and I got dirty cooking for alla you freeloaders.” Tony’s gaze slid to the right, following Jim’s gesture, and Jim didn’t bother to hide his grin watching Tony wince at the teetering tower in the sink. “When was the last time you did KP duty, Cadet Stark?”

~* Tony Stark *~

Of all the problems Tony Stark had in his life, not knowing what to say had very rarely been one of them. He’d cultivated his glibness for decades, used it for sword, shield, armor, and occasionally even bait, and while it had definitely gotten him into deep water in the past, it had never before, ever before, fully abandoned him.

Until now.

He had a mission, (feed the invalid Super Soldier and his buddy.) He had an excuse to be in the sub-basement that gave him all the opening he could have asked for, (the feeding of said invalid, and extending of hospitality to the Interloper.) That should have been plenty! He’d made billion dollar mergers with far less to go on.

Still… here he stood: halfway down the stairs, balancing a pot of Rhodey’s best comfort soup and a stack of bowls on a tray, staring at the thin slice of light reaching out across the floor from the not-quite-closed vault door. It was just light. Not even a laser, just ordinary yellow light from an incandescent bulb. But Tony found himself sweating at the thought of stepping onto that too-straight, too short yellow road.

It wasn’t an anxiety attack. It wasn’t. That would be stupid.

Steve couldn’t even sit up in bed yet, according to Wilson’s report, and Barnes… well, he clearly didn’t want to lose the arm he still had left, so… Tony closed his eyes, tried to picture something calming and benign – like, say, Loki’s portal over Manhattan, swarming with Chitauri and space whales.

Okay. Okay, _that_ was an anxiety attack.

He looked at his feet, considering whether he’d rather try to sit and get his head between his knees, or just go back upstairs and try to wash dishes without breaking anything. Then a laugh from inside the vault yanked him right up out of his mental death spiral. 

“Really?” he heard Steve ask, incredulous and happier than he could remember hearing the man to date, “He called it that?”

Barnes’ answer was warm as the yellow light across that cold stone floor. “Said so right on the crates – I checked to be sure I wasn’t hallucinating.”

Again Steve laughed, and despite the churning of his weasel-brain and its fucked up chemistry, Tony couldn’t find mockery in it, or derision, just happiness as he said, “That does sound like Tony’s sense of humor. It worked though?”

Despite himself, Tony held his breath a little.

“Yeah. I mean… it wasn’t a picnic, but… I got through it. And the words are… they hurt me, yeah, but they don’t _erase_ me anymore. I figure that’s what really matters.” Tony heard a hiss of breath, long and labored, and ending in a sigh. Then Barnes pulled a transparent cheer over his voice and went on. “So then we packed up Stark’s barf and headed to the last place Natalia had seen you, and … here I am.”

“And the others?” Steve’s skepticism was as clear as the worry underneath it. “How’d they take it?”

“Um. Nobody tried to shoot me?” Barnes replied, “Not so far, at least.”

Steve groaned then. “Bucky… I’m… if it isn’t safe for you, then-”

“Don’t.” The word came down hard as a slap, and Tony jumped a little in his own skin at the vehemence of it. “Don’t you think it, Rogers, don’t you think it even for a minute! You say there’s anyplace in the world I oughta be right now except right here, right with you, and I will pop you one right in your lyin’ mouth!”

“Bucky...” The word was sad, and fond, and thick with the sort of gravitational mass that broke the hearts of neutron stars. And it was _not_ meant for him. Tony turned, ready to retreat back upstairs, but…

“What about Tony?” Steve asked, careful now, and worried, “Is he taking it okay, d’you think?” 

And oh, like hell could Tony stop eavesdropping now.

The silence stretched out, long and considering, but eventually Barnes said, “Detente, I think.” The cot creaked beneath a shift of weight, and Tony realized he could hear the sound of cloth rustling as he went on. “I want to apologize to him, you know? For his parents? I mean I want to, and I feel like I _ought_ to, but. I can’t really tell whether that would help, or just start the whole stupid fight up again?”

And that was where Tony found himself moving; down the last five steps, striding across the open, empty sub basement like he’d never felt a moment’s hesitation in his life. 

“I’ll take “Distracting Irrelevancies” for Fifty Million, Alex,” he said, shoving the door aside with his foot and angling the tray.

Barnes immediately stopped trying to put his shirt on, and pivoted to put himself between Steve and the door, as if they couldn’t all see how clearly he was down a mechanical arm, and sporting no guns or knives at all. “And in case that pop culture reference is lost on you, Sirhan Sirhan,” Tony told him, making an effort not to look at the black fabric covering the stump at his shoulder, “that means ‘no, you should not apologize.’”

Barnes held his gaze for a long moment, cold steel eyes assessing and dispassionate as bullets, but then he dipped his chin and answered, “Noted.”

From the bed, Steve made a frustrated noise, and hefted himself up on his elbows with a grimace. “Tony-”

“Steve,” Tony answered, and made himself cross the room to put the tray down on the table that someone (probably Barnes) had brought down and set by the wall, “I’m not being petty, it’s logic, okay?” Tony set the bowls out; one, two, and oh apparently we’re breaking bread together now, thanks Rhodey. The silence behind him grew weighty with expectation and Tony mentally kicked himself even as he lurched to fill it with words.

“I know it might not seem like it from what went down in Siberia,” he said, making careful work of ladling the thick soup out of the pot, “but I’m a big fan of logic. So. If what Natasha showed me from HYDRA’s red book of atrocity is true,” he glanced up just in time to see something like fear flicker through Barnes’ sniper stare, and he acknowledged it with a nod that wasn’t comfortable for either of them, “then you were not responsible for what they made you do. And if you were not responsible, then you don’t get to apologize for it, and I don’t have to forgive you for it.” He picked up a bowl, dropped a spoon into it, and thrust it at Barnes like a dare.

He took it with far more reverence, like the peace offering Tony wasn’t ready to call it. But he still made sure their fingers didn’t brush on the transfer.

“I’m not saying I’m holding a grudge,” Tony went on after a breathless, awkward moment, “I mean. I’m trying not to.” Tony didn’t bother to try and meet Steve’s eyes as he passed his bowl and spoon over – he knew where some of his limits were, after all. “But I mean, either you _could_ have not killed them, but chose to kill them anyway,” he said, going back for his own bowl and straddling the chair so he could put his back to the wall, “in which case I would sooner see you burn in an electric chair than shake the hand you’ve still got, or…” He made himself ignore the tiny, distressed noise Steve made in favor of meeting Barnes’ sniper-stare and telling the universe that he was absolutely not scared, “or you really had no choice in the matter at all, in which case your ‘I’m sorry’ is invalid, and a waste of time and energy for both of us.”

The stare went on for another long moment, and even while mentally telling himself that it would be stupid to get into a staring contest with a sniper, Tony found his eyes watering, straining against the urge to blink. 

Eventually though, Barnes was the one who broke. He was smiling when he did. 

“You do realize the words “I’m sorry” can mean other things too, right?” he asked, turning to take a seat on the cot near Steve’s stacked-up pillows, and setting his bowl on his knee so he could pick up the spoon.

And just like that, the weather broke.

“Yeah, I’m allergic to sympathy though,” Tony said, fighting a smile, “So let’s not even go there. Only,” he reconsidered after a spoonful of soup, “There is one thing I _am_ willing to hear from you about that whole fucking shit show; the name of the person who ordered the hit.”

And yeah, there was something twisting in his guts that was afraid – fucking terrified, even – that he would hear Obie’s name in answer. From what he’d read of Romanoff’s HYDRA dump, Stane had been exactly the sort of international chaos-engine they’d actively recruited everywhere they could, and he sure as hell had proven he knew his way around a contract killing when he tried to have Tony murdered. He didn’t want to hear Stane’s name… but how could Tony find peace with his parents’ assassination if he was afraid to ask for the truth?

Barnes looked down. He wasn’t evading, or hiding from the question as far as Tony could see, but rather considering; brow creased, lips pressed tight, all but sweating for the answer. Tony wasn’t really surprised when he finally closed his eyes and gave his head a tiny shake. Disappointed, maybe, but not surprised.

“I would.” Barnes’ voice was thick with regret, and his eyes were unshuttered as he looked up to catch Tony’s gaze. “If I knew, I would tell you. The only one I remember from around that time is the handler who gave me the orders though, and...” his glance slid past Tony and lighted on Steve, no less regretful. “And Natasha says Zemo killed him before the Vienna bombing. I’m...” He glanced back at Tony, then away. “I’m sorry.”

Tony sighed, and stuck a spoonful of soup in his mouth. “Figures,” he grunted, which was about as much absolution as he had in him. For awhile, the mutual silence of soup-consumption was something approaching comfortable,. But then Steve, of course, just had to push for more. 

“Tony?” he asked, holding out his bowl like a Dickensian orphan, woeful and wounded and stacked like a brick shithouse with very guilty eyes, “I’m sorry too.”

Tony cut him a glare, then leaned to snatch the bowl from his hand. “You’re sorry?” he snarled, viciously ladling in more soup, “For what, scaring me to death with your petty little vital signs crash? You’re sorry for making me break an international treaty just to come find out whether you were even alive?” He pretended to consider for exactly half a second, then thrust the bowl back at him, ignoring Barnes’ snort. “Yeah, no. I’m still mad at you for that.”

“Oh yeah,” Barnes agreed, heading to the tray to refill his own bowl. “Right there with ya.”

Steve rolled his eyes, but took the refill all the same. “I’m sorry for keeping it from you when I suspected-” Tony waved the rest of the unwanted apology away like it stank. Which, kind of, it did.

“Yeah yeah, I read your letter, Rogers,” he grumbled, “Apology accepted, we’re done. Now will you eat your damned soup please? And what’s with that face?” he demanded of Barnes, “You have an observation to make, or do you just need a laxative?”

Barnes didn’t rise to the jab though. Nor did he take his thousand-watt glare off the open door as he set his empty bowl aside and stood. “Steve?” he asked, in a voice that absolutely did not make Tony feel like prey.

“Yeah,” Steve replied, voice low and tense as he set his own bowl aside and tried to sit up again, “Same as earlier. That’s no rat.”

Tony tapped the earpiece of his glasses, but the HUD offered him nothing but static and scrambled data. “So for those of us without serum enhanced senses, d’you two wanna maybe share with the class?”

“Something’s moving,” Steve growled, face chalky as he strained to ignore the injured bones that were not quite ready to be taken for granted yet.

“Natasha?” Tony offered, level and sensible and not worried at all as he turned up the amplifiers and listened again, “She said she was going to do some poking around down here, and-”

Barnes shook his head, then bent to pull a knife Tony hadn’t even noticed in his boot. “No. This is… bigger.”

“Farther off,” Steve added, “Sounds a little like… an engine? Maybe?”

“Not steady enough,” Barnes contradicted, then sniffed the air. “And I don’t smell diesel. Something rhythmic though… Metallic...”

Tony pushed the amps to full pickup and held his breath to listen. But he still couldn’t quite tell for sure whether the rushing, shushing noise he could almost, kind of hear was their bogey, or just the blood in his own veins.

“Okay, we’re on a mountain,” he whispered, giving up the ghost hunting in favor of science, “Some kinds of stone can amplify sound waves, carry them for miles underground with very little distortion. So if this mountain is still cooking some active vulcanism in its guts, then maybe what you’re hearing isNGAH!!!”

The intercom across the room crackled, and Tony yanked the glasses off and flung them as far from his ears as he could manage. 

“Tones?” Rhodey’s voice asked from the shitty speaker beside the door as Barnes plucked the glasses from the air before they hit Steve. “Tony? You okay down there?”

“Fine...” he gasped, pressing one hand over his thrashing heart and checking with the other to see if his ears were bleeding. “We’re fine. All fine here. How are-”

“The drones picked up movement half a mile down the road,” Rhodey cut him off, all business and no Star Wars whatsoever, “Two vehicles inbound, and some civilians that don’t match. Looks like maybe a hostage situation.”

Barnes swore and dropped to his knees, reaching under the bed for… shit, where the hell did he get a fucking Dragonov out here in the Transian boonies? “Which direction?” he demanded, as Steve grimly started yanking the sheet out of the tangled bedclothes, “I can get onto the roof and provide cover.”

“Whoa,” Tony said, putting himself between them and the door, “That is a stunningly less than awesome idea, given how you,” he pointed an accusing finger at Barnes, “are still an international fugitive. And come to think of it, you are too Cap. We don’t know who these guys represent, and I do NOT want to take another call from Secretary Ross today, so just – will you stop it with the sheet, Steve? Because you are completely _not_ going out there Gandhi style, okay?”

“Tony,” Steve began, and his voice was a seismic rumble in his chest.

He held up his hand, steady as a rock, and not vibrating with fear at all, thank you. “Just let us handle it, Steve,” he said.

“Agreed, Captain,” said Rhodey through the intercom, “The whole team’s here, barring Viz. It might be a negotiation, or they might be scouting-”

“Or it might be a trap.” Tony tried to ignore how the hair on his neck rose at the naked threat in Steve’s voice.

“Or it might be a goad by Russoff’s pack to force you into a territorial rage-shift,” Rhodey answered from the wall in his best ‘yes, I do outrank you soldier’ voice, “In which case you walking out there into scenting range of their alpha will guarantee that we’ll all be in danger from _you_ before the moon even thinks about rising!”

“I can-” Steve began, but Rhodey wasn’t done yet.

“AND if your wolf comes out fighting for the first time, it’ll want to come out fighting every time,” he said, loud enough to peak the intercom mic, “And that means every month for the rest of your life, Cap, and nobody in the _world_ needs that, okay?”

“I...” Steve took a deep breath through his teeth, and Tony watched him force the urge to shout down deep under it. “Damn it...”

“Language,” Tony prodded, offering his cheekiest grin when Steve cracked one eye to glare at him. “Just let us handle it, okay? I’m going upstairs now. You stay here, and you,” he pointed at Barnes, “Stay with him. If we need help, I guarantee you’ll know it, okay?”

Barnes gave him a hard look, but then cut it toward Steve, who was still stewing in his own personal frustration nightmare. He gave one crisp nod, and set the gun back down into its case. “I’ll stay with him,” he promised.

And that, Tony supposed, turning for the stairs, was probably the best he was going to get out of them.


	8. The Gauntlet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bombs, bunkers, and the best-laid plans.

~*Russoff hunting lodge, Mt. Wundagore, Transia *~  
~* Bucky Barnes *~

“Bucky...” Steve growled as Stark’s footsteps retreated up the stairs.

“Yeah,” Bucky sighed, glancing wistfully at the gun case on the floor, “I know.”

“I mean it!” The bedding rustled again, creaking like he was maybe using it to keep himself still, or to drag his lamed ass upright, more likely. “You _know_ I can’t just sit down here and-”

“I know, Steve,” Bucky said, and bent to shove the rifle back under the bed, “It’s like they don’t even know you at all.” 

Because if what Rhodes had said was true, then locking Steve in a box and telling him to lie still while there was a fight going on was the very best way in the world to get a feral, man-killing wolf out of him. Always had been, even back when he’d been a hundred pounds wringin’ wet, and never closer to a werewolf than a matinee movie ticket.

He was already halfway there when Bucky stood upright again; frustration and fear painting fever-bright across his cheeks even as pain whitened his lips and popped sweat across his forehead. “I’ll lose my mind worrying,” Steve dithered, gaze skittering about the room, “And what if it’s true, what Rhodey says about the-”

“It’s true,” Bucky said, sitting on the bed to drag the velcro tight across his boots, and unsubtly leaning back into Steve’s side to do it. “Probably true, I mean. He says he’s got kin who live like this, so he’d know, and it does make a certain kinda sense, but…” He sat up, turned and grabbed the hand Steve had knotted into the bedsheets, “But it ain’t gonna happen to you, Stevie,” he promised. “If my halfassed serum could throw it off, yours’ll kick its ass right to the curb, guaranteed.”

“Bucky?”

He ignored the weighty tone of Steve’s voice and plucked Stark’s fancy glasses from a fold of the comforter. “These things work for you, d’you think?” he asked, “Or just for Stark?”

Steve’s eyebrows drew down, a warning heat sparking across the blue of his glare. “Buck…”

“Looks like they’re supposed to be some kind of ride along to his armor’s display,” he said, holding them up and peering through the glitching green and red lines the over-painted the world. “But if we want to catch a signal, we’re gonna have to get outta this vault.”

“Dammit, Bucky!” Steve grabbed for his arm, but Bucky eeled grinning away.

“All right, ease up; I’ll tell,” he laughed at Steve’s murderface. “I was exposed once, back in the fifties, is all. Went through all the same steps of infection that you’ve hit so far, but in the end my serum threw it off.”

“It…” he blinked. “It did?” And lord, but that hope sounded small and fragile in his voice.

“It did,” Bucky assured him, turning to fix Steve with all the certainty he could dig up. “Full moon hurt like a mother, and HYDRA lost some medics before it was all over, but I woke up human, and stayed that way ever since.” He settled his hand into the hard, sweaty curve of muscle where Steve’s shoulder swept up into his neck, and squeezed. “Your serum’s always been better than mine, pal, so I figure you’ll be all right, so long as we can keep a lid on that Irish temper of yours. Now come on,” he gave Steve and his too earnest face a jostle, “let’s get upstairs where we can hear what’s going on.”

Steve grimaced, and gave his legs a betrayed look. “I can’t,” he admitted. “My hips still-”

Bucky jostled him again, harder this time. “Did I say you should walk anywhere, dummy?” He scooped Steve’s hand up onto his own shoulder, and then turned to show his back. “Just get hold, hang on, and I’ll carry you. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with your arms, right?”

The hammerlock Steve pulled him back into by way of a reply was gentle enough, and Bucky laughed even as he gave the nerve cluster above Steve’s elbow a playful flick. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Here. You put these on first,” he said, passing Stark’s glasses over his shoulder. “You can sweet talk Stark’s flight computer into sharing the goods once I get us up into signal range.”

“She might not cooperate,” Steve said, settling them into place, and taking a better, weight-spreading hold around Bucky’s shoulders. “I mean, I’ve cleared the air with Tony, but she was fighting us in Siberia too. I don’t know if she’ll be holding a grudge.”

“She, huh?” Bucky grunted as he stood, dragging Steve over his back like a well-muscled but bad tempered cape. “Well, If Stark ain’t, then I bet she ain’t either.” He got his balance settled, leaned into Steve’s weight, and headed for the stairs. “But even if she don’t like the idea much,” he mused, climbing from stacked red stones to smooth grey concrete, “she’ll probably still like it better than you going out there where Stark is and hearing whatever’s going on out there in person.”

“Affirmative, Sergeant Barnes,” a girl’s voice, softly and generically Irish-flavored, crackled from just behind his head. He and Steve both jolted in alarm, but memory clicked before Bucky whipped around to fight. He’d heard that voice in Siberia, faintly, muffled behind Stark’s armor and nonstop chatter.

“It’s _Bucky_ , damn it,” he corrected reflexively, turning climbing to the ground level basement and heading for the store room with the big exit window in it.

As he expected though, she went on without acknowledging him at all. “Keeping any and all potentially deadly infection vectors out of reach of Mr. Stark is a strong preference for my current coding parameters,” she said. “Would you like a secondary projection from the War Machine’s cameras as well?”

“I…” Bucky could feel Steve’s throat force a dry swallow before he managed. “Yes please, FRIDAY. Could…um. Think you could keep the ride-along between us for now please?” And that was Steve in his Sunday best Nice-Boy voice, Bucky realized as he shoved cans and tools off the worktable and dropped the pillows he’d brought in their place. The voice that charmed a thousand nuns, explained away ripped britches, broken windows, black eyes, and stray kittens to all comers except for Ma Rogers, who always saw right through.

Only judging by the computer’s chilly answer, she wasn’t having any either. “If the Boss doesn’t ask,” she said, all prim, “and his safety is not in question, I see no need to distract him with irrelevant data.” Then the tiny speaker in the glasses’ earpiece gave a buzz and a click, and two projection beams shot out from the temples, searching along the walls until each found a flat enough space to display the feeds they’d asked for.

“Ouch… irrelevant data,” Bucky smirked, backing Steve onto the makeshift couch and easing his weight down on the pillows. “Your way with dames hasn’t improved, I see.”

“Shut up, or I’ll bite your ear,” Steve grumbled miserably, hefting himself more securely onto the shelf and turning to set the glasses onto the windowsill. The projections adapted to the shift without a flicker, Bucky noticed with admiration.

“Rain check me that for later, okay?” he offered, rolling his shoulder and cracking his neck now Steve’s weight was off it. “Once the kennel club has cleared out, I’ll take you up on it.”

“Hmph,” Steve replied, “Jerk.” But he was smiling.

Then the left hand projection on the left targeted a moving patch of black in the snowy wood, and the camera zoomed to show three black Humvees picking their way up an unplowed road between tall, dark trees.

A hundred yards ahead of the small caravan walked a child with a basket, two very large dogs, and a single man carrying a gun.

~*~

Someone clever had set up a warning cordon half a mile from the hunting lodge – a warning of bitch piss, ripe and ready to whelp, sprayed here and there along the road. As if to warn of a traveling pack stopped in the territory to let a mother den and whelp, unable to flee if chased, and so willing to fight to the death for their own if pressed to it by the range’s rightful owners. The someone in question was clever enough, but clearly they did not run on four paws, no matter how the moon led.

It was a decent bluff, for an ape, Casimir had to admit. Even in Transia, where the odds of knowing a wolf bitch on the whelp were higher than in other places, most wouldn’t have thought of the ruse at all.

Wiping out a whole pack would risk an alpha’s own standing if too many of his own were wounded in the battle. Given that the problem would once again be mobile, and subject to being chased off – or if necessary, picked off one by one as they left the den to explore – in only a few weeks, few pack leaders would bother to challenge the desperate bid for safety. It would have been a credible ploy, if not for two very big flaws.

First, even in wyr shape Casimir could smell the taint of plastic containers in which the piss had been transported to the lodge. It was as clear a tell as a gambler’s sweating palms. Second, even if there had been a whelping bitch to defend, this was no paltry territory dispute, to be handled in peaceable, traditional ways.

Transia was at war. Casimir’s father had been attacked by peasant apes in his own home, and murdered in his own hunting range, not ten miles from safety. His uncle and both his elder brothers had gone out together to run the assassin to ground, and were now, together, missing as well. Their blood tainted the air of the Wundagore mountainside with death even as the interloper’s scenting ruse tried to paint it with life.

The Russoff family and pack, what remained of it, was being brought to bay across the country. Casimir’s birthright, cornered and picked apart by snarling rebels, curs and apes alike, who deeply needed a reminder of just how the Russoffs had come to power, and an example of the lengths the pack would go to in order to defend its sovereignty against all comers. A fair warning of the consequences the rebels would soon themselves be facing when Casimir’s grander, more global plans came to fruition.

So perhaps another pack alpha might have shied from the threat of a bloodbath, but as far as Casimir Russoff the third was concerned, a bloodbath would would be just the thing.

Tradition had its place, and as far as he was concerned, that place was in the dustbin of history. He was ready to take this war on his own terms, now the elder Russoff alphas were all out of his way. He was ready to lay the foundations of an Empire not even his father had imagined.

A whirring of small motors came to his ears; whining high and coming fast. He sniffed the air with a smile. Americans and their toys, just as the rumors had suggested. That would up the ante, and the potential rewards all the higher.

“Stop here,” he said to the child, who obeyed with neither a glance nor a word. She hadn’t spoken since the soldiers had plucked her out of the woods near Dragorin – too simple to realize how close she walked to death, most likely. Still, she was obedient enough, and having her carry the bloodied blue and red uniform they had found in the ruins kept Casimir’s own hands free.

Phina paced ahead a bit, nosing derisively at one of the sprayed shrubbery patches before she too sat, ears up and waiting for their guests to come and greet them. Morya, as usual, did not move from Casimir’s side.

It wasn’t long before the whirring motors found them – Small drones surrounding the advance like an insect cloud. Almost distracting enough to allow the man in the wing suit to drop from the overhang onto the road ahead of them unnoticed. Casimir sipped the dark skinned man’s scent from the air as his metal wings folded out of sight behind him. He didn’t hide his smirk. This one had been at Dragorin. He was not the assassin himself, no, but he had aided him. Perfect.

Casimir nudged the girl’s shoulder with his rifle.“Take it to him,” he ordered, and she did. Phina rose to follow, but stopped when several of the drones dropped to block her path with clear, laser sighted menace. Casimir answered her annoyed glance with a minute shake of his head. Let them have their comforting illusions for now. Every threat they made now would only strengthen his position later.

A woman’s voice called out, directionless as the child drew near the man, and she stopped to answer in the Slavic peasant’s cant Casimir had never bothered to learn.

Morya’s spine bristled, and she growled deep in her chest as she searched the rocks and trees for the speaker. She would have no luck, if Casimir’s theory was right – and the longer things went on, the more he was certain it was.

Another directionless question, a longer, more involved answer, and the girl took the basket to the man, as ordered.

Then, whether from concern for her kindred back at the base, or simply not wanting to be shot in the back for disobedience, she returned, docile and resigned, to where Phina waited behind the line of drones. _First point to me,_ Casimir decided.

Watching the man’s face freeze in recognition when he looked into the basket, he awarded himself the second point as well.

Then one of the drones near him clicked, and the woman’s voice spoke in elegant Muskovite Russian from behind Casimir’s left shoulder.

“Why have you come here?” she asked.

He smiled, without any doubt that she could see his expression, and replied. “Bringing a widow’s lost property back to her is considered a courtesy in my country.” No point bringing up that the lodge, the road, and half the mountain under it was Russoff property to begin with – they were all well aware of that fact.

“Using a civilian hostage in a bomb vest to do so isn’t courtesy in any country,” she countered, unshaken. “Nor is approaching with an armored military convoy with an assault team, short range artillery, and attack dogs. However, if you would prefer to continue pretending this is a negotiation, I can indulge you for awhile.”

Attack dogs. Of all the calculated slights in her address, that was the one that burned. Morya’s throaty growl, and Phina’s silent show of teeth let him know he was not alone in his reaction.

“Of course, I did not bring you everything we discovered at the rebels’ village,” he went on once he could trust his voice, “There is some evidence we held back for the scientists. Not ours, of course,” he added letting his show of teeth pretend to be a grin, “Transian government services are suspended for the time being, but we have allies with excellent analytical capacities, and from what the Secretary of State has said, he is quite eager to apply them to this particular case.”

The black man smiled back, called out in obvious cheer as he took the bloodied uniform out, shook it, then wadded it up tight and stuffed it into a bag. Something about kissing, Casimir thought – his English was never very good. 

The woman’s reply was just as amused. “You’ve opened the bidding; it’s time to say what you want.” She had the air of one calling a bluff at the casino table.

“I want,” Casimir said, the Russian words precise between his teeth, “what you took from me.”

The silence was considering. Then, “Me, personally, you mean?”

Which was interesting. “Yes,” he tried.

“That’s not possible,” she replied at once. “It was never yours to begin with, and it’s not only been removed from Transia entirely, it has also been destroyed. There’s no getting it back now. Not for anyone, no matter how wealthy, ambitious, or entitled. Next request?”

So his father had bought the book after all, damn him! And he’d kept it secret from him too, even after Casimir had done all the work arranging things with the Sokovian last year. 

It took a moment to fight the rage shift down, and his teeth were longer than they should have been when he managed a reply. “Then we want the assassin. The one who murdered the President last week. Send him out.”

Again, the considering silence. “We don’t know who killed the President,” the woman lied. “There were many combatants at the site of-”

“WE know!” Casimir lost the struggle not to shout. “We can smell his change in the air – skin to fur and back again! We can smell the moon taking him. He will come out. You will send him out with his Second, and he will fight for what he has stolen!”

The black man tossed the basket, sent it tumbling down the road so accurately that Phina had to dance aside or be struck by the ridiculous missile. “No. Alpha. Pack. Challenge,” he said, slowly and loudly, as though he spoke to children, or idiots. “He does not want your pack.”

“Then he should not have killed our alpha,” Casimir snarled back, not bothering with English, since someone was clearly translating for the man. “Send him out! He will fight me wolf to wolf; the challenge of alphas is our way, and this _ghozjo_ will stand to it!”

“This _ghozjo_ is not a wolf though,” the woman said, calm as glass from a drone on his other side, “The change hasn’t taken him completely.”

“We will greet the moon together,” Casimir declared, “And she will judge him before us. She finds him unworthy, we will try him as a man for the murder of the President – my father – and he will face the firing squad!” Morya pressed her weight into Casimir’s leg, either to calm him, or to remind him that the Americans might be recording this. Either way, he needed to check his wrath. “I will give him one hour to prepare himself for the change, but then he will come out,” Casimir went on when he had collected himself “To prove he is worthy to keep what he has stolen from me.”

“One hour for a drumhead trial, or a dogfight for a pack he doesn’t want to keep,” the woman said, amused, “Not a very tempting offer, given that we can be gone in under ten minutes.”

“I know who you are!” he shouted, “I know who wants you dead!”

“Do you really? Because I’ve lost count,” she replied. “Still, if you could prove either of those claims, you would already have US troops here on the ground, surrounding this compound. Or else HYDRA might be sending you in to provide a distraction while they set up a long-range bombing to eliminate us all in one hit. I am still not seeing a good reason to stay and play your game.”

Casimir made himself smile. “Then perhaps you will consider the people down slope of this property, who will be inconvenienced when I ignite the bombs my people have placed in the mine shafts,” he suggested. “There are twenty villages on this side of Wundagore; at least eight in the direct path of the avalanche that would cause. Nobody will miss them, of course, but I have fond memories of that lodge, and so I would rather not destroy it.”

The girl looked up at him, her vacant face twisting into something like outrage until Morya reminded her of her place with a growl and snap of white teeth.

“Still, buildings can be rebuilt once the rebels have been reminded of all that they stand to lose,” he said, catching the girl by her shoulder and turning her back down the road with a shove toward the waiting Humvees. “And who knows,” he added, catching the black man’s scowl with a grin as he turned away himself, “the disturbance might even expose a new vein of silver to help finance it all.”

He took three steps through the crowd of hovering drones, feeling the weight of eyes, seen and unseen, between his shoulders, and then he turned for his last reminder. “One hour till moonrise, Avengers. He will come out, and the moon will decide how he dies.”

~* Sam Wilson *~

“Well,” Rhodes said, dry as dust in Sam’s earpiece, “That’s a court martial.”

“Relax,” Natasha came back, sounding bored as the watcher drones began to reassemble into their larger, more powerful units, “He’s bluffing.”

“Don’t know as I’d make that call,” Sam came back, watching the poster boy for wealth-privilege abuse saunter his happy ass on down the road like he was just out to shoot skeet, not come out with his hostage and his bodyguards to demand a fight to the death over territory rights. “He’s got a pretty good hand.”

“And he just showed it all,” she agreed. “We can beat it.”

“We can,” Stark agreed, his voice echoing strangely from the Quinjet’s cockpit, “With some careful editing of what we just recorded, we can put Cujo Junior on about ten international war criminal lists, whether Steve winds up getting his fursona on or not.”

“Av-a-lanche,” Sam reminded them sternly, watching the little girl’s ruddy curls disappear from view beyond the road’s curve. “Massive civilian death toll. Weren’t we fighting over this just last year?”

“They won’t trigger it while their leader’s in range to go under in the fallout,” Natasha answered, melting out of the boulders’ deep evening shadows.

“And if this is a formal challenge, then at least half of the pack will need to be there to witness the fight. With the revolt already posing a challenge to Russoff’s control, the pack will not want to risk losing that many fighting members,” Rhodes added, bringing the War Machine up the slope from the east where he’d been waiting to flank if needed. “Still one hell of a hold-out gun though.”

“Guns don’t work without bullets,” Wanda put in, coldly furious from her station at the top of the ridge, “They’re turning the cars around now. We need to go find those bombs.”

“Um. Could you all please come back to the Lodge first?” Barnes’ voice cut unexpectedly into the comm channel, “There’s been kind of a development.”

You could have heard a dragonfly fart in the moment of appalled silence that followed that announcement, but then it was cussing and acceleration all the way. Not a one of them really had any doubt what they’d find when they got there.

~*~

“He said it was his goddamned _choice_ ,” Barnes told them, glaring at the wolf in the kitchen like he was thinking of lighting it on fire with his mind.

“Said if he could end this fight one on one, without anybody else having to get hurt, then a course he ‘had to do it’.” He lifted his hand in a one sided air-quote loaded with so much sarcasm Sam could feel it from across the room, “Like it was ever gonna be that fuckin’ simple!”

Unconcerned and enormous, the wolf – _Steve_ , Sam forcibly reminded himself – went right on crunching his way through a rack of beef ribs like they were milk bone treats. He’d dragged them off the counter top, at least, so he wasn’t gnawing where they all could watch, but the sound was gruesome and unmistakable. From behind War Machine’s one-suit-barricade, Sam didn’t know whether he wanted more to laugh, throw up, or maybe faint, but he was soundly appalled by all three potential reactions. 

“Oh, of course he did,” Stark ranted digital outrage from behind the Iron Man mask, gauntlets on his fists, glaring at the wolf – at _Steve_ – from the end of the island. “Of fucking COURSE! Because it’s not like having to deal with an internationally wanted, potentially man-eating disease vector during a hostage situation COMPLICATES THINGS OR ANYTHING!”

Steve’s only reaction to that was a deep grumbling whine, and a couple thuds of his tail. Then the crunching resumed.

“Belay that shit, Tony,” Rhodes snapped in full armored command mode, his arms outstretched to herd Sam, Natasha, and Wanda behind him. “It ain’t useful. And don’t you even think about taking that armor off,” he added, stalling Stark’s reach for his helmet clasp. “That wolf can go from calm to bloodbath faster than FRIDAY can get it back on you again!”

Sam swallowed, staring past the kitchen island Steve’s tail and hind paws. Each of those feet looked about the same size as Sam’s own hand at full spread, and Sweet Jesus, had all the wolves been that big? Or was the serum just maximizing the species potential on Steve yet again?

“Now Barnes,” Rhodey went on, shooting a quelling look at Natasha as she edged toward the kitchen, “tell me how this happened. Where was Steve at when he made the shift?”

“Um. The basement?” Barnes answered, looking confused. “We were down in-”

“In. His. Head,” Rhodes cut off each word with his teeth, “Where was he at in his _head?_ Bred wolves can shift at will without the moon, but bitten wolves _can’t_! Not unless they’re raging!”

“He wasn’t,” Barnes came back at once, edging a little closer to the kitchen, as if to shield Steve from the rest of them. “He was mad, sure – he never liked bullies – but he wasn’t out of control. Trust me, I’ve seen him lose his temper, and he wasn’t even close with this. He was just…” He shot a fondly annoyed look at the wolf, who thumped his tail on the floor in answer, “Determined. Like he’d thought it all out, and knew what needed doing.”

“He _ALWAYS_ sounds like that!” Stark complained, throwing his arms wide.

“That’s because he usually does know,” Natasha said, “which is why it bothers you so much.” She took another step toward the kitchen, stopping with a glare when Rhodes’ gauntlet unsubtly blocked her path.

“Ok first?” Stark came back, popping open his face-plate so he could back up his bitching with a glare, “Steve is _not_ the only man with a plan! And second, he’s not even a man right now!” He threw up his hands, a flash of red and repulsor blue as he turned his frustration on Barnes. “Why the hell did you let him do this? We had the situation under control!”

“ _Let him_ do this?” Barnes came back, all teeth behind incredulous laughter, “How’d you want I shoulda stopped him? Harsh language?”

Behind the counters, the crunching stopped. A chill ran down Sam’s neck.

“You were supposed to keep him from changing!” Stark yelled, red-faced and oblivious as Steve got to his feet in the kitchen, “It’s what you were here for!” Sam could see the top of Steve’s shaggy head over the kitchen island, and Sweet _Jesus_ he was fucking _big_!

“ _He’s_ what I’m here for!” Barnes shouted, stabbing a finger toward the kitchen, “Whatever shape he’s in, whatever he needs, whatever it takes. That’s _always_ gonna be true!”

Steve barked once, loud and commanding as he heaved his front paws up onto the counter top, knocking what was left of the thawing meat to the floor. Every one of them jolted back a step, and everyone but Barnes reached for a weapon.

Steve was as tall in fur as he was in skin; his meal smudged along his jowls, chest, and paws – a ruddy stain against the pale fur, and a vivid, Pleistocene reminder of the ‘red in tooth and claw’ lesson in case anybody in the room had needed one. Sam hadn’t needed one; not after Rhodes’ warning about _calm to bloodbath_ ; not after seeing the bloody traces left of the wolf pack Steve had taken on last night.

But then Steve-the-fucking-dire-wolf made a noise that hung somewhere between a whine, a grumble, and a huff – the kind of noise a puppy makes when you fake the throw one too many times, and he wants you to know he’s disappointed, but loves you anyway. 

Sam found himself wanting to smile, because honestly, who the hell could keep up a fear response in the face of those woeful blue eyes? Natasha snickered, her shoulder brushing Sam’s as she put away her Widow’s Bites, and reminded Sam with a glance to holster his own gun. This was Steve, after all. It was still Steve. It had to be.

Like a stern executive behind his desk, Steve pointedly eyeballed Barnes, and then Stark, who answered the look with a sour glare before snapping his helmet closed. Steve gave a frustrated whine and a shake that set his ears flapping, then he sighed, dropped off the island, and paced into the dining room, making a non-aggressive yet inexorable beeline for the corner the two men had been squaring up in.

“Back away, people,” Rhodey said, moving to keep his armored bulk between Sam, Wanda, and Natasha, and the wolf, “Barnes, Tony, give him space...”

Honestly, even Sam could have told him that wasn’t gonna work.

Stark’s gauntlet twitched as the wolf approached, but he didn’t raise it, didn’t charge the repulsor, didn’t try to fend the wolf off at all as Steve put himself between him and Barnes. There really wasn’t enough room for it – Barnes was already up against the cellar door, and Steve had to sit on Barnes’s foot to manage it. Then, in order to stare up expectantly at the armor’s blank face, Steve’s chin almost brushed Stark’s chest. 

But Iron Man only looked down, put his hands on his hips, and very pointedly did not back up.

“Tony...” Rhodes warned, face plate open, arms out as if to pin Sam and the women behind him. “You are way too close to that werewolf.”

“Steve won’t hurt him,” Barnes said, winding his fingers into the deep, tawny fur at his ruff.

Steve’s tail thumped once against the floor, as if in agreement.

“He’s not Steve right now,” Rhodes insisted, “Not with the moon under the horizon and-”

“He is though,” Wanda’s voice was soft with wonder, and her eyes, when Sam glanced over at her, were swimming in scarlet light, “He feels like himself to me – like Steve, not like an animal.” Her fingers crooked and plucked, as if weaving thoughts out of the air. “He feel ...clearer, less complicated. Less conflicted about what he wants, what he needs...”

“That’s not how,” Rhodey began, then jolted back again as Steve bounded up onto his hind legs and hooked his paws right over Stark’s armored shoulders. Tail thudding at Barnes’ legs, he gave one bark; short, loud, before swiping a lick up the golden mask, from chin to forehead.

Sam and Natasha both caught at Rhodes’ arms, keeping his repulsors at bay as Stark did step back, sputtering. “Ugh! Did you just?” Steve stepped right along with him like a dancer, tail waving as he licked the mask again. 

They could all clearly see that the wolf was grinning now, untroubled by the armored gauntlets winding into his fur and trying – but not very hard – to push him away. That could have been because even the armor’s digitized spluttering sounded more like Stark was trying to fight off laughter than an assault though.

“The moon isn’t up yet,” Rhodes protested as Barnes snickered at the two, “He’s never taken full shape before! Rage shift should have him feral – flooded with stress hormones and...” Steve stopped licking long enough to give an enthusiastic little yip in Rhodey’s direction, then went back to his ‘attack’. “That’s not how this works!” Rhodes insisted, “That’s not how any of this works!”

But by now, Stark had lost the fight, and was openly giggling. Everyone else in the room was smiling too – including and especially wolf-Steve.

“All right you two,” Natasha finally said, ducking past Rhodes’ blocking arm, “You can get a room once we don’t have a budding tyrant threatening to blow the whole mountain down.” She buried both hands in Steve’s shaggy amber ruff and hauled him to the floor. He let her shift him, but stalled long enough twist around and boop his nose against her temple, leaving behind a ruddy smudge she didn’t seem to mind all that much.

“You say his reason’s intact?” Natasha asked of Wanda, who nodded at once, her eyes tracking the movement of the other woman’s fingers, kneading like a cat in the long, thick fur at Steve’s neck. Sam thought she looked a little envious.

“Then we go with that,” Natasha decided, giving the fur a tug that got Steve sitting handsomely at her side. “It means Steve’s smart enough to draw the fight out and buy us time to find all the bombs. I found an air shaft down to the tunnels in one of the sub basement root cellars earlier. With a little work, we should be able to get it open wide enough for the armored suits.” Here, she turned to Iron Man, who was clomping past Barnes to get a towel from the kitchen. “Can FRIDAY get us a map of the silver mine?”

“Not soon enough to be useful,” he answered, wiping down his face plate. “And even if there were any maps in digital format, they wouldn’t be accurate. Mine owners would sooner gargle lead than risk anyone scalping on their claim.”

Natasha nodded, annoyed, but unsurprised. “Right. We’ll search in person then. You’ve both got metal and chemical detectors in the armors; Sam’s visor has macro-scanning capabilities, and Barnes and I both have man-tracking skills, so that leaves Wanda to stay with-”

“No,” Wanda interrupted, stepping forward, “No, I should go into the tunnels. You should stay here.”

“Wanda,” Natasha began, but Steve shook her hand away from his neck and stood to circle behind her. “What are you- hey!” Natasha protested as Steve set his shoulder to her thighs and herded her toward Sam with unmistakable intent. “Seriously?”

“You and Sam should stay here,” Wanda answered, as if narrating for the wolf, “The Russoff pack needs to know know where you are. They’ve seen Sam, they’ve heard you, and obviously they know Steve is here. They may guess the rest of us are here, but they don’t know for sure.” She reached out a tentative hand to Steve’s broad shoulder and added, “They should know that Steve is not here alone while we search for the bombs.”

_Well shit,_ Sam thought, even as Natasha surrendered to the nudging and came to his side with a sigh. “Would they though?” he asked Rhodes, “Would they try and murder him if this is a formal challenge?”

“Any other pack, I’d say no,” Rhodes admitted bitterly. “Any legitimate alpha challenge, that kind of shit would lose the killer any chance at leadership, but this…” he shook his head. “This pack seems to run more like a human crime mob than any wolf clan I’ve ever heard of.”

“Which means Barnes stays up here too,” Stark put in, helmet finally opened to show his face again. “Not that I think being stuck with you in an underground labyrinth wouldn’t be fun and all,” he added in response to Barnes’ grunt of protest, “But you’re our ace in the hole. Well. Maybe our one-armed-Jack-with-a-scope-and-a-50-caliber-Dragonov in the hole. But either way, it’d be stupid to actually put you in a hole when the bad guys aren’t in the hole too, so I vote no hole for you.”

“Well that’s a switch,” Barnes snorted, “but I’ll take it. Because if you think,” he pointedly aimed a glower at Steve, “If _any_ of you think I’m gonna let this dumb punk face down that wolf pack without me covering his six, then you’re all stupider than you look.”

~* Bucky Barnes *~

“You know,” Bucky said once the last of the armored suits had disappeared down the new hole in the root cellar floor, “if Stark takes that Wakandan communicator apart, the Princess is probably gonna kick your ass.”

Natalia leveled a smirking glare at him and braced her hands across her breasts. “The sixteen year old Princess?”

“The one with an army of Dora Milaje at her command,” he confirmed. “Seriously, you know they never let Wakandan tech get out if they can help it, and you just gave one to-”

“Loaned one,” she corrected, catching his elbow and turning them both toward the door, “I loaned one to Stark, who has neither the tools or the time he’d need to mess with it tonight anyway. And how else were those three supposed to keep in touch with us or each other when none of our regular comms work underground here?” She closed the root cellar door, fending the orange cat away before he could slip through.

“I’m just saying,” Bucky began, then had to twist away from her elbow jab.

“You’re just dithering,” Natalia challenged, wrapping her hand through the bend of his elbow and pulling in close, “because you don’t want to show that Sam’s questions bothered you.” She clasped his arm as he tensed, fair warning that she had no intention of letting him evade, so he didn’t bother to try.

“He’s a medic. I know he’s trying to help, but the arm… it’s… I don’t...” he sighed. “It’s complicated.”

“Very,” she agreed.

“Bad enough when it was on me and I had to hide the thing, but this is the longest I can remember being awake without it, and...” he stole a glance at her face as they turned to the stairs, “I keep on forgetting it’s not still there.”

“Except for the weight,” she observed, because of course she would notice how he moved differently now.

“And the pain,” he agreed, but only because she wouldn’t dare pity him. “I didn’t tell Sam, but it took Shuri’s team three days to remove the pieces.” Bucky shivered at the memory. Wakandan pain blockers had been good, but they’d still needed him awake during the search, and that had been… fraught.

That news, apparently, did surprise Natalia. “They didn’t leave the housing?” she asked, “The anchor points? The neural contacts?”

He shook his head, made himself find the words. “No. Shuri was worried about toxic fluid leakage, and T’challa was worried about tracking devices. They said it all had to go.” They climbed in silence for a few moments before Bucky made himself draw in a deep breath and drop the tension from his shoulders. 

“It was all HYDRA tech anyway,” he said as they turned on the landing and brought the kitchen door into view. “So good riddance to it, I guess.”

“Hmm,” she mused, her green eyes sparkling as she pointedly leaned into the knife he wore on his left hip out of habit, “Try that again when you mean it.”

He made his wide and guileless as they turned the final landing. “Don’t you trust me, Natalia?” he asked, and she snorted.

“You wouldn’t trust me if I did.”

~* James Rhodes *~

“It’s like you don’t even trust me,” Tony whined.

“Or like I’ve known you for eighteen years, and you’re way more predictable than you think you are,” Jim replied, not bothering to hide his smile since there was nobody near him to see it anyway. “All I’m saying is don’t go silent too long down here, cause you know then I’ll have to come find your ass.”

“Because you don’t trust me!”

“Because Pepper would kill me if I came home without you, actually,” Jim said. “And can I just point out that you are complaining about me asking you to _not_ shut up is priceless irony here?”

“Well maybe I was trying to be considerate? I’m sure Maximoff doesn’t really want to hear me talking her ear off for the next hour.”

The girl gave a snort, so clear over the weird little gel-com Jim almost expected to feel the huff of her breath behind his ear. “Don’t worry Stark,” Wanda replied, “I can ignore you all day if I have to.”

“And I got another one,” Jim announced over Tony’s manic comeback. He followed his spotlight to the smooth gleam of painted steel against the rough stone wall, and crouched to inspect it.

“Whose is it this time?” Tony’s playful outrage was gone, replaced with the weariness of a man forced to confront, yet again, the abject, abusive sham that had been his relationship with Obadiah Stane.

The missile had been built for arming a fighter jet, but someone had pulled the wires out of the guidance interface and attached half a brick of plastique and a kitchen timer. “HammerTech,” Jim said as his HUD found and enlarged the serial numbers. “J 600 BunkerBitch. Looks like it’s about fifteen years old.”

“A JBB?” Tony scoffed in obvious relief, “That’s easy. Just get it up onto its tail fins and leave it. It won’t go anywhere, it won’t ignite its thrusters or deploy its payload, and it won’t even look pretty while it’s not doing it.”

“I feel like the C-4 should come off the side of it though,” Jim answered, already spotting the right wires to pull from the putty.

“Yeah, grab that,” Tony agreed, “Could come in useful later. Anybody found the elevator yet? The SuperBuddies said they heard something like a hoist engine earlier today, and we still need to search the other levels.”

“I don’t know where the elevator is,” Wanda answered after a moment or two, an energy of excitement coming into her voice, “but I think these train tracks I just found will probably lead me to it.”

~* Sam Wilson *~

“What?” Sam complained, stumbling through the snow with a wolf at his back, “What is it, boy? What do you want me to do? Did Little Timmy fall down the well and get a compound fracture of the upper mandible?”

That won him a moment of respite and a deeply unimpressed look from Steve, but it didn’t last long. “Look man, I get you want to test drive the new body and all, and I agree you don’t want to do that inside, but why the hell do you need me to-” Sam stumbled over a buried branch and cussed with vehemence, “Damn it Steve, there’s nothing out past the barn except the Quinjet!”

Whereupon Steve gave a cheerful yip that was much too small for him, bounced in a triumphant circle, and then headbutted Sam’s thighs again.

“The Quinjet? Seriously?” he turned toward it despite his confusion, just to get Steve to quit trying to herd him, “Dude, what the hell do you need from there?”

Steve ran an excited circle around him – which was significantly cuter when he was like this than when he’d done it on the Washington Mall – and made a weird half yip, half howl kind of noise that sounded a little bit like “Yiouuuuu!”

It would have been kind of adorable, if at least three other wolves hadn’t immediately set to howling back in furious response. They were at least three miles away – Stark’s drones had confirmed that when the Russoff pack had retreated forty minutes ago, but to Sam’s wire-tight nerves, it sounded like the wolves were lurking just out of sight beneath the evergreen skirts of the trees.

Steve’s hackles went up at once, a standing ridge of gold from head to haunches, and the growl that came out of him then was anything but cute. Sam backed up – he couldn’t help it, his inner primate hominid had definite opinions regarding his proximity to that angry apex predator. Then, because the food-chain moment wasn’t alarming enough, Sam’s earpiece crackled to life, and he screamed like a kid with a spider in his shirt.

“Sam, where are you two?” Natasha demanded, voice sharp with nerves.

“Outside,” he answered, one hand over his thrashing heart as he forced himself to continue across the yard. “Steve’s got some obsession with the Quinjet, only he won’t use English to tell me what it is, so we’re playing charades right now.”

“Hyuu uum,” Steve grunted, making a clear effort _not_ to sound anything like a howl.

“No good, still can’t understand you,” Sam answered as they approached the Quinjet’s jump-hatch, “Nat, you got any idea what he’s after here?”

“I might,” she admitted after a moment, “Why don’t you go on in with him for now. I’ll come out and join you.” Then the channel closed, and lacking any good reason not to, Sam entered his passkey and palm print, and let Steve herd him onto the jet once the ramp dropped down.

Apparently that wasn’t enough though. Steve kept on nudging, leaning, nosing, and shoving until he’d driven Sam all the way up to the cockpit, and the pilot’s chair. That was the point when Sam decided he’d really had enough.

“Oh now, I _know_ you are not tryn’a get me to take this bird away and leave your ass behind, white boy!” Sam told him, glaring and dodging aside as Steve tried to bounce up and push him into the chair. “Because you would not disrespect me that way! Not after I took the fall for you in Leipzig and-”

Steve pushed past him, as far as he could in the cramped space, and slapped a saucer-sized paw onto the weapon’s console with a meaningful and very exasperated glare.

“He’s got a point,” Natasha said from the open end of the hatch, “The Quinjet does carry the biggest guns in our arsenal, and with Iron Man and War Machine underground, having some air support would be a good idea.”

Sam turned, looked right past Steve’s smugly vindicated wolf-grin, and considered the idea. It would put him in the air, which would be much more comfortable than in a firing blind or behind a barricade. Aloft, the Quinjet’s stealth features could cloak it from sight, even at close range, and its armor would be up to any kind of attack the wolves, or their armed escort could mount, even if they did know it was there. Might be a slight problem if Russoff Junior chose a dueling piste under tree cover instead of out in the open, but the Quinjet’s infrared scanners could easily penetrate that, and its cannons could clear the firing range of all obstacles in ten seconds or less if he needed them to. 

It _was_ a good idea. But Sam still gave Steve a dirty look as he shoved his shaggy ass out of the way and turned the pilot’s chair to sit.

“All right,” he said to Natasha, ignoring Steve’s bouncing triumph, “So if I’m air support, I’m guessing Barnes will be covering things from the attic window?”

“And I’ll be providing ground support,” Natasha agreed, “Since they’re expecting him to come out with a ‘second’.”

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Sam asked, as Steve’s cavorting abruptly stopped, “I mean, that’s a whole lot of hostile infection vector waiting for you out there. They’re fast, and they’re strong, and your suit’s no better armor than the one Steve was wearing when they got to chewing on him.”

“That’s why you’re going to loan me the Falcon EXO,” Natasha explained as the red cat wandered into the open hatch and jumped up to investigate the planning table in the center. “I know I don’t have flight training with the unit,” she said, holding up a hand to forestall his protest, “but I’m pretty sure I can use it like a reverse parachute and get clear if things get...”

_Don’t say it,_ Sam thought, watching her lips quirk to the side, _Don’t you say it!_

“...hairy.”

Sam slapped a hand over his groan, listening to Steve’s weird little puppy yip, and the scrabbling of his claws on the metal deck. The cat hissed, and there was a little skitter, but when Sam opened his eyes again, Steve was bounding out into the snow, Natasha was watching him fondly, and the cat was still on the planning table, recovering its dignity with a quick wash.

“Eight minutes to the hour,” Natasha told him as she stepped off the gantry and slapped the ramp control. “You should get aloft and scout the range.”

“Wait,” Sam yelped lurching out of his chair as the door clanged shut. He cursed and reached for the comm console to open a secure channel to her earpiece. “What the hell am I supposed to do with the cat?” he demanded, watching the thing bound off the table to inspect the wall where the door no longer was.

“Keep him from becoming a wolf snack,” Natasha answered, and damn it, he could _hear_ her smirk, “Or you can find a laser scope once you’ve got the autopilot configured, and introduce him to the Uncatchable Dot.”

The cat thrashed its fluffy tail, standing up tall against the ramp hatch in search of something to claw. “Aowwwt!” he demanded, throaty and annoyed at his entrapment.

“You and me both, kitty,” Sam sighed, sitting down again and reaching for the flight harness.

~*Tony Stark *~

“Okay,” Tony mused, tossing aside the ignition array from the remains of the torpedo he’d just finished ruining, “so far, we’ve got twenty year old SI Iceman torpedos; we got missiles from HammerTech, Almac-Antey, Northrupp-Grummond and Norinco;”

He turned to continue down the tunnel, following the promising current of cold air he was really hoping was going to turn out to be the elevator shaft, “We got a fertilizer bomb; a pound of C-4 in a pressure cooker with a digital clock; most of an SI sonic cannon someone totally salvaged off a smashed AV – which I’m betting got smashed during the Culver University Incident, by the way – and we got that scary TNT-and-Duct-Tape that Wanda found. Have I missed anything?”

“I found a vertical ladder shaft,” Rhodey came back, briefly excited. “And… aw damn it.”

“Cave in?” Wanda asked, sounding tense.

“No. It’s another damn torpedo. Where’d they _get_ all this shit, some kind of black market yard sale?” he complained, and Tony had to laugh – because screaming would have been too tiring. But before he could find a joke within his answer, Wanda’s voice came back.

“You’re in Transia, Colonel,” she said, dry, wry, and thoroughly done, “Black Market is pretty much the only market, just like in Sokovia. You’re looking at the country’s primary export right here – dumped at a discount every time a superpower decides to upgrade. It’s a better profit margin than mining, and what doesn’t get sold to criminals, just gets used to keep men like Russoff in power.”

“Not this time, kid,” Tony decided, forcibly cheerful despite the bitter weight her words had left in his gut, “We’ve just got to...” but then the alarm beeped, and his HUD flashed the time at him in red.

Their hour of lead time had expired. 

Steve would be going out to fight any minute now. The weight of that knowledge, and the reality of what they were facing settled over Tony’s shoulders like an anvil, grinding his pep talk to ashes and nausea in his mouth. They were playing blind man’s bluff with live ordnance they couldn’t accurately number, in tunnels that could run for miles into the mountain’s guts. Any of those bombs could bring down tons of stone onto their heads if they handled it wrong, and even if they handled it right, there was no guarantee that nothing would collapse out of pure, subterranean spite, and god, God, GOD but Tony had forgotten how much he fucking _hated_ caves!

“Well,” Rhodey broke the silence after a long moment, shaking Tony out of his spiral just as he’d done a thousand times before, “I guess we’re just gonna have to put a dent in the gross national product then, right?”

“Right,” Tony managed, trusting his voice only that far.

“Right,” Wanda said, sounding not much happier. Then after a moment, “Huh...”

“Huh? What huh?” Tony asked, pausing at a side tunnel to scan down as far as he could, “What are we huhing about now, Miss Maximoff?”

“There’s a rockfall over these tracks… looks recent.” She grunted, and the comm carried rattling sounds to them all. “I think I can get over it though.”

“Be careful,” Rhodey warned, “If they weakened some of the supports in here, you don’t know how stable the ceiling will-” But the crunching rattle of rocks falling – heavy and fast and horrifyingly clear over the comm channel – cut his warning entirely off.

The worst part was not hearing Wanda even scream.


	9. Desideratum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rules, rage, and jungle law.

~*Russoff hunting lodge, Mt. Wundagore, Transia *~  
~*Natasha Romanoff *~

“It’s time,” said the wolf at the door when Natasha opened to her hammering summons, “Where is he?”

Swimming in the mink she’d pillaged from Russoff’s closets, Natasha gave the naked woman and her Kalashnikov a smile and answered her Russian with more of the same. “Behind you,” she said, stepping out and shutting the door as Steve stood up, broad, pale, human, and silent from the end of the porch, a sweeping arctic fox coat barely covering him from the freezing twilight air.

“We were starting to think you wouldn’t come,” Natasha said as the woman whipped about, rifle raised. “But we’re ready to go when you are.”

“We?” the woman scoffed, backing casually toward the steps so she could cover both of them with her rifle as Steve approached, “No. He comes, and his Second; but not you. Unless...” she offered a head-tilt and a predator’s smile, “unless he is bringing you for refreshment?”

For a moment, Natasha considered whether to give her the reaction she wanted, or the reaction her threat deserved, but then Steve caught her eye with a querying look, and reminded her what was at stake. “Unless your English is better than I think it is, he’s bringing me as a translator,” she said in English, casually putting herself between Steve and the woman. Then, when the woman’s face clenched down into a snarl, Natasha repeated herself in Russian, and didn’t bother not to smirk.

“He is going to fight, not to debate,” the woman spat, backing down the steps without a shiver for the muddy snow underfoot, “If the moon finds him worthy, then the tongues of Men will not matter. If she rejects him? Then nothing he says will matter. And you, scurry back into your stolen den and tell the Other One to come out, if he holds That One’s honor worth the trouble of leaving shelter.”

“What Other One?”

The wolf grinned knowingly at Natasha’s evasion, and pointedly sniffed the air. “If you did not wear so much perfume, even your wyr nose could smell the Other One on him.”

“Widow?” Steve murmured, reading the tone of the exchange where the words escaped him, and clearly not liking the gist. Natasha spared him only a glance and the tiniest of head shakes, but the woman did not miss it.

“Before the moon clears the ridge,” she grinned, gesturing past the barn with her rifle, to where the sky was silvering behind the trees, “send both of the interlopers out to face us, or we will know what to think. And we will know what to do.”

And then she turned her back, and walked away as if she had nothing at all in the world to fear. Which told Natasha a great many things about this so-called duel Steve was about to walk into. The woman was less than halfway across the cleared yard when similarly nude figures began emerging from the tree cover to meet her. A dozen at first, then more, and more, and more.

“At least half the pack, Rhodes said,” Steve murmured just as Natasha gave up counting them. “Guess that makes this official, huh?”

“That’s one word for it,” Natasha grumbled. Then she woke her com with a tap. “Barnes, get down here. There’s been a change of plans...”

~* Wanda Maximoff *~

Falling, flailing, Wanda reached out into the darkness – reached out with the fear, fury, and fire inside her blood, and clawed at the rushing world until it stopped. The stones still falling cracked to powder against the scarlet shell arcing over her head. Then their dust poured away, leaving her hanging in the air; arms flung wide, body curled up hard and tight, red blood and redder force a whelming roar beneath her skin.

Voices shouted nonsense and static in her ears, barely heard over the crash of stone and her pulse. Wanda’s heart pounded like a bird against her ribs as the rockfall settled to whispering dust around her, and she held her breath, trying to remember the ways of light, of gravity, and of words.

From the size of the echoes in her ears, she was not positive she wanted much to do with either. Words seemed too much like screaming, gravity seemed a very, very long way down, and while something beneath her panic knew that light would come to her – and eagerly – if she called it, something deeper yet was reluctant to break the darkness’ grip on this place.

As though the darkness might be insulted if she did.

“Maximoff, report,” said a voice in her ear, implacable and solid; commanding without shouting. “Where are you? What’s your condition?”

_Rhodes_ she thought, and just like that, English returned to her.

“I’m all right Colonel,” Wanda breathed, uncurling her body and feeling for the shape of the space with her mind, “I’m not hurt, but I don’t...” she blinked in the almost-darkness, trying to make out what she was seeing by the Red’s grudging light, “I’m not sure where I am.”

“Okay, keep your comm channel open!” Stark. That was Stark, almost-shouting in her ear from half a mile away. “I can triangulate, between War Machine’s signal and mine, and come get you-”

“No!” Wanda wrenched herself around in the air, hand outstretched though she had no idea why she wanted to fend his rescue away. Then she flinched as her flailing hand slapped the cave wall. Smooth, but not polished: a wall worn by the passage of water, hands, and time; a wall warm as living fur beneath her hand.

A wall that she could suddenly and quite clearly, see.

There was another hand print, white as a moth next to her own hand on the stone – whiter for the outlining spray of dark ochre over the glittering seam of tiny white crystals. A few feet below, another hand print stretched, cinder black against the ruddy stone, and another hand beyond that in gold, and another still lower, ash white. The hand prints wandered along the wall like murmured words in a language Wanda’s heart insisted she should know, and keep sacred.

“I’m not hurt,” Wanda heard herself telling Stark, as though from ages away, “The fall just surprised me. You should keep looking for the bombs.” _And not come here,_ something vast and certain added in her thoughts, where you do not belong...

“Wanda, can you get back out to the tunnel that collapsed?” Rhodes asked, cutting off Stark’s well intentioned fussing, “We should all stay on the same level until one of us finds that elevator shaft.”

She looked upward, spotting the rusted, rotten tracks jutting out like broken teeth over the collapse that had dropped the roof into this chamber. It was twenty or thirty feet, and perhaps as many centuries away from the tumble of stone over which she was hovering.

“I can get out,” she said, staring at the ghostly line of white crystals, winding like thready smoke through the painted red stone around her. It was true – it would take her almost no effort at all to lift herself back up to the tracks, and to follow her own trail backward through Wundagore’s plundered guts, unerringly as a bloodhound to the lodge. 

_But I won’t,_ she added silently and she let herself sink, following the ghostly hand prints down into the luminous dark, _Not yet, anyway..._

~* Bucky Barnes *~

By the time Bucky made it down from the attic, there were over fifty werewolves in the cleared meadow in front of the lodge.

There was enough ammo in the attic where he’d left his gun and tripod set up to tap each one at least three times, but while he knew the Widow was no slouch with a rifle, there was only so many she’d be able to drop before she had to reload. And without the metal arm to fend off bites, Bucky really did not want to find out how hard he’d have to punch a werewolf to make it stay down.

“Well shit, Steve,” he said, closing the lodge door behind him, “Looks like you’re my mission again, don’t it?”

“They, uh, didn’t like Natasha’s perfume, I guess,” Steve shrugged, blushing defiantly. Then he gave Bucky’s tactical black a once-over and half a grin and added, “From the look of things, you’re a little overdressed there, pal.”

Bucky snorted, and zipped a looted parka up tight. “You’re the one they expect to see all dolled up in furs tonight, punk. I’m just there ‘cause someone thinks they smelled a bite on me. And I ain’t about to stand around freezing my ass off while you play fetch with the kennel club.” He put his booted foot pointedly down in deep snow as he left the porch, then smirked at Steve’s pale, bare feet as he followed him down. 

The urge to smile faded though, as they approached the silent, waiting crowd though. Roughly a third of them had traded two feet for four by the time Steve and Bucky came among them. The pack made space for them to pass, but only if they weaved through one by one. Several were growling under their breath, leaning in toward Steve as though he might find them a threat when he towered over everyone there, and could bench press every one of them without changing shape.

It was insult, Bucky knew – insult, pure and simple, meant to rile them into acting foolishly and turning this duel into a mob scene. He knew better than to rise to it, and just this once, Bucky knew Steve knew better too. But Bucky was still tempted to square up and knock their braced shoulders aside as he followed Steve to the big chair in the center of the crowd, and the smug, tuxedo-wearing, snot-nosed brat holding court within it.

And Steve, God love him for a New-Deal Yankee, walked straight through it without a scrap of reverence. Past the courtiers, past the arm candy, past the ass kissers, the thugs, and honor guard, and right up to loom over the throne, so close that his own bare foot knocked Russoff’s polished shoe backward in the snow. Then he nodded a dismissal to the bristling bruisers who were looming beside the chair, and aimed a too-chummy grin down at the kid.

“I hear you’re looking for a fight,” he said in German as Bucky stepped into the bodyguard’s way and stared them down. “But you don’t look dressed for it. We can come back later if you need more time to get ready.”

Russoff glowered, clearly trying to figure out how to look down his nose at someone towering above him. Bucky kept his eyes on the honor guard, letting the weight of impending violence be felt in his glare until the would-be tyrant sat up straight in the chair and opened his mouth.

“He said that is a nice suit,” Bucky told the crowd in Russian, rolling his roughest Volga dockside accent right over whatever Junior had been intending to say, “And he will hate to ruin it when he kicks your teeth in.”

Glaring, Russoff snapped his fingers, and Honor Guard number two stepped up. Taller than Steve by an inch or two, and almost as broad, he aimed a shove Steve’s way, then stumbled when Steve suddenly wasn’t there to be shoved. By the time he got his feet in the snow, Steve had a casual elbow leaning on the high carved back of Russoff’s chair, and a hand draped _almost_ within grabbing distance of the kid’s scalp.

Honor Guard One snarled and made to lunge for Steve, but Bucky was ready for him. He had the shorter guard in a modified headlock before he’d popped a single claw. It won him a wink from Steve, who otherwise kept his attention on Russoff as he scrambled out of the chair to escape the threat.

“I expected a stand-up fight,” Steve told the boy over the muttering of the crowd, “You against me, for the leadership of your pack. Unless…” he peered at Honor Guard Two, who was already showing jagged teeth and a spreading shaggy pelt across his many tattoos, and asked, “Unless he’s the alpha in charge, and you’re just here to make book?”

And Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, never let it be said that Steve Goddamnit Rogers didn’t know exactly how to pick a fight.

“You are a _peasant_!” Russoff spat in Russian, “A wolf-bitten, bloodless cur from a line of peasants, and I will not sully my teeth on your throat!”

“He says he doesn’t want to fight you,” Bucky translated loudly in German, his arm still flexed hard around the wheezing Honor Guard’s throat, “Guess that means you’re in charge now.”

The crowd snarled, surged forward until a gunshot clapped them all silent, and a white plume of snow erupted two feet from Russoff’s shiny black shoes. Natalia reminding them all of the rules, just in time.

Steve stood up straight, flexed his fingers together and raised them high over his head, dropping the expensive white fur off his shoulders into the snow. “Well, I didn’t come out here for a garden party I guess,” Steve said to the crowd in German, “So if you want to appoint yourself a champion, I’ll fight him, I’ll beat him, and we can all decide what to do from there.”

“If the moon will have you, pig-dog!” Honor Guard Two grunted through his ragged teeth, “Otherwise, we eat you both!” His German wasn’t half bad, actually, Bucky mused as his compatriot stopped struggling and went limp against his chest.

“Why wait?” Steve grinned, and just like that, the change swept over him.

Easy and quick it was; with none of the straining, groaning, cracking and screaming the shift had taken out of Steve earlier that day. This was a lunge that turned into a leap, and a leap that turned into a golden wolf of massive proportions crashing into a grey wolf that hadn’t quite gotten its feet under it yet. 

Which then turned into a screaming flurry of teeth and claws and flying snow.

And that led to a furious little man in a tuxedo skittering away from the impact just as the moon peered up over the ridge, and cold white light swept the last traces of naked skin from the surging crowd.

Bucky roared, and slung the limp wolf he held into the rowdy pack as the man in the black suit disappeared from view. Then he braced up on his hind legs, shook the shreds of cloth and leather off his hide, and let his teeth and claws declare his intent to crush the skull of the first wolf to try and interfere with the fight.

Some part of him would probably be shocked at this later.

That part didn’t know how to find him now though. He dropped to three legs, rushed the ring of onlookers, and sent a couple of wolves tumbling as he bowled through the crowd to reach the center of the piste, and the golden wolf’s side.

~* Sam Wilson *~

“I feel like I should be more surprised by this than I actually am,” Natasha’s voice slid smoothly over Sam’s headphones as he double checked the IR scanner’s readout.

“That!” he confirmed, coolly and without shouting, “Is A Fucking Bear!”

“Yes,” Nat agreed.

From the co-pilot’s chair, the cat gave a yowl, and Sam called up the night scope camera to be sure what he was seeing. “That is an actual bear where Barnes should be,” he told Natasha when the image didn’t go back to being just a surly, one-armed super soldier watching over a pack of surly locals, “Didn’t he say he threw that shit off and never changed?”

“That is what he said,” Natasha agreed, “But I’m starting to think he may have been mistaken.”

Sam took a moment to curse all brain-damaged part-time stealth zoo-species of his immediate acquaintanceship. Then he winced as the bear sent one of the wolves tumbling like a bowling ball across the clearing. “I’m thinking we might have a lot of currently furry Transian Nationals to shoot if it turns out he doesn’t remember the plan right now.”

“He remembers,” Natasha said after a quiet moment, during which Barnes bellowed and feinted a swing at a couple of the onlookers who risked a lunge at the two combatants as they tumbled too near the crowd. “A wild bear cornered by that many wolves would be causing a lot more mayhem than he is.”

“If you say so,” Sam began, but his complaint was cut short by a crackle from the Quinjet’s com channel, twinned in a bizarre echo through Natasha’s gel-com pickup.

“Romanoff,” said Stark – because of course it _was_ Stark, and apparently the importance of using call signs in the field had never quite connected with him, “We have kind of a Situation here.”

“Oh, we definitely have,” she agreed, mild and wry, “You go first.”

“Well, we may or may not have lost Maximoff-”

“I’m _fine,_ Stark,” Wanda said distantly.

“Sometimes we can even still hear her voice...” Rhodes added, battlefield humor at its weirdest.

“And we’ve recovered a lot of weird-ass, white trash ordnance down here,” Stark went on, “but we just found something that raises the stakes a bit. More than a little bit, I mean. It raises the stakes a whole hell of a lot.”

“Fuck,” Sam put in, watching the gold wolf and the grey break from their first clinch and circle in the mob’s hollowed center, “Not a nuke. Tell me they don’t have a fucking nuke down there!”

“They don’t,” Wanda’s voice came back.

“Not that we’ve found,” Stark corrected peevishly, “Yet. But what they do have, is an intact and apparently functional HYDRA cryo tank set up with a twenty-day battery pack and a backup generator in the mine’s central freight elevator. Which means, for those of you keeping score, that this whole duel charade is _definitely_ a setup.”

There was silence for a heartbeat, and then Natasha muttered something Russian, ripe, and stinking under her breath. On the field below, the grey wolf charged the gold for another grapple of teeth and claws.

“All of which makes me wonder if General Ross knows that his local favorite’s playing both sides of the game,” Stark mused, and Wanda snorted in immediate derision.

“Bold of you to assume General Ross is playing only one side himself,” she put in.

A snicker escaped past Sam’s throat-thick horror. “She’s got you there,” he said, then added, casually as he could, “Oh, and by the way, Barnes is a bear right now. Just thought you’d all want to know.”

The horrified silence that met Sam’s announcement was both vindicating, and opportune, as it gave a perfect background hush for the cat’s sudden yowl to fill as he stood up against the flight controls and swiped at the monitoring drones’ holo feed.

On the field, the wolves were rolling, the gold pinning the grey on his back, keeping his pale chin pulled up high and out of biting range as his amber tail wagged in triumph. Then he bounded up and away, and the grey scrambled to herd him back toward the chair that Russoff had made his people carry up the road before the shit show had properly begun.

“A bear,” Stark said.

At the same moment, Rhodes swore, “The arm. Of course that’d stop a shift.”

“An actual Bucky Bear,” Stark said, a manic giggle straining at the edges of his voice.

“Document that tank and disable it,” Natasha clipped, bringing them all back on point, “And start working your way back to the lodge. It’s time we ended this.”

“International incident...” Rhodes singsonged.

“Says the man disarming an American torpedo set to collapse a mountainside on innocent Transian peasants,” Wanda came back, unimpressed.

The cat yowled again, shooting Sam a furious glare as the drones followed the grey wolf’s rush to crowd the gold back against Russoff’s gaudy chair.

“You’ve got a limited window to get up here and convince me that ending this with a bullet in Russoff’s head right now isn’t the way to proceed,” Natasha announced as the grey wolf pressed forward again, cutting off the gold’s end run for open space.

He was definitely herding Steve to that chair, Sam realized, but why?

“You even know which one of those wolves down there is Russoff?” Sam asked, not as uncomfortable with the idea of sniping the little asshole as he knew he ought to be.

“One of the black ones,” she said, muting the channel on the others’ protests. “Got it down to one of five possibilities. You wanna scan that chair for explosives?” she added as they both watched the grey try and body-check the gold into it again.

“On it,” Sam replied, reaching for the controls to do so.

But the answer came quicker than he could ask the question. The grey lunged, Steve leapt vertically, clearing the snapping jaws by a solid yard. Then he bounded off the back of the chair… Which immediately toppled into the hidden, spike-filled pit trap that Sam, Rhodes, and Wanda had dug and then concealed at the edge of the clearing that morning while Steve and Tony were sleeping, and Bucky and Natasha hadn’t even arrived yet.

“STEVE! NO!” Sam screamed, watching Steve flail and fall in a cloud of snow and pine needles toward the pit he only now could see beneath him. The wolf pack erupted in howls so raucous Sam could hear them through the Quinjet’s hull.

Barnes dropped from his upright guarding stance, bellowing in rage as he smashed his way toward Steve and the open pit. But Steve twisted midair, lunged against nothing, spat in the face of physics, and somehow managed to get his forelegs to the pit’s edge, stopping his fall just short of the rebar stakes at the bottom.

The grey didn’t waste his chance. Steve’s chin was up, straining to the side as he sought purchase against the pit’s frozen walls with his hind legs. There was no way he could fend off the flashing jaws that lunged for his throat.

But Steve could still duck, apparently; and he could thrust his own head up like a battering ram into the grey’s chest as he overshot his lunge; and he could cling to the pit’s side as, with a strangled scream, the grey wolf, Russoff’s self-proclaimed champion, went headlong over his shoulder, and into the pit of spikes.

~* Steve Rogers *~

Steve didn’t like to call what had just happened “luck”. Not for him, made suspicious by his opponent’s insistence on shoving him toward the trap, nor for his opponent, who lay gurgling his last on the impaling stakes below. But he damned well did know that, in letting Steve get hold of the pit’s edge on the way down, luck had at least tipped the scales his way.

“It’s over!” he shouted, or as close to the words as the shape of his mouth would allow, “I win!”

But the roaring, heaving throng of wolves around him neither heard, nor, it seemed, cared. They mobbed Bucky as he tried to rush to Steve’s side, and they swarmed Steve as well, shoving and biting at each other in their eagerness to get him properly into the pit trap. 

A disappointing end to the supposed duel, perhaps, but Steve couldn’t find it in him to be really surprised.

He dug his hind claws deep, felt the catch of hoarfrosted stone between his toes, and _shoved_ , seizing the first wolf that tried to bite at him and tossing it over his shoulder. Like the grey, it fell to the spikes, as did the next two whose lunges he ducked.

They screamed as they died, but only briefly. 

Steve did not give himself time to regret, just hauled himself up to level ground and roared his defiance to all comers. He needed no words to let them know – to let the world know – that he could do this all day.

Bucky was fighting hard now, bellowing in rage and hampered badly by his missing leg, but still managing to throw the wolves around like leaves in the snow. 

Steve worried, briefly, whether he remembered that they were supposed to be drawing this fight out and buying time, but then a lucky rush by a smallish, brindled female nearly sent Steve skidding into the pit, and he had to admit that the time for stalling was probably over. Nobody was even pretending this was a duel anymore.

Any moment now, Natasha and Sam would probably begin to fire into the crowd of wolves, thinning and scattering the mob so Steve and Bucky wouldn’t be overwhelmed. In the meantime, Steve dug in, lunging, twisting, biting and clawing, brawling as madly on four legs as he ever had on two, just to hold his ground while Bucky, as usual, fought his inexorable way to Steve’s side.

The pack knew, it seemed, when they could no longer keep them apart. They withdrew from his reach, limping, bleeding, and seethed from bloody muzzles as Bucky rolled to Steve’s side, turned and heaved himself up on hind legs with a roar. Steve let his tongue loll, mocking through his grin as he watched the wolves realize that they couldn’t get at Bucky’s exposed belly without getting past Steve’s jaws, and they couldn’t get at Steve’s vulnerable back without encountering Bucky’s crushing claw.

Steve caught the eye of a black wolf in the throng – smaller than most, standing still despite the anxious jostling of his fellows. He radiated a fury colder, and more personal than the pack around him, and Steve knew without needing to catch his scent that he was Russoff’s whelp, come sniffing after his father’s place.

The black wolf threw back its head in a strange, yipping howl that pierced high and sharp through the pack’s rumbling noise, the growl of engines, the huff of wind and warning from friend and foe alike.

Steve dropped his chin, bared his teeth, and repeated himself to the wolf who had called him out to this sham of a challenge. “I. Win,” he said through his teeth, and in a moment of pure theatricality, that was when the shooting began.

But it wasn’t the wolves who fell.

Steve felt Bucky jerk at his back, heard the breath escape him in a shocked, pained huff. He whipped about just in time to see the great bear twist in place and pitch backwards into the pit, blood streaming like a scarlet ribbon from his head as he fell.

Steve had barely time enough to scream before the pack was on him again. This time the rangy black wolf took the lead.

~* Wanda Maximoff *~

The deeper she went down the well-like shaft, the fainter the team’s voices became. Wundagore’s red stone guts buried even the Wakandan tech’s signal into whispers and mumbles. As if with every step in the warm and ancient darkness, she was leaving the present and its troubles far, far behind.

The hand prints on the cave walls changed to other symbols as she went too. Some were simple pictographs, others were geometrics and spirals, and still others that almost looked like crude Cyrillic letters. All of them were old though; scraped, sprayed, chiseled or painted by hands long absent from any memory of the sunlit world. 

Wanda didn’t look at the markings too long. There was a part of her very well aware that she could lose days just looking, staring, musing, unraveling the stories those ancient writers had meant to tell. They must have hung in rope slings to paint all this, dangling like spiders from ledges far above, for no scaffolding could follow the rippling and curve of the wall’s spiraling shape. They must have come here to the darkness for generations to find their stories, to find their place in the vast span of time that ran all the way back down to mud and water. And oh, what time she could spend on that past now…

But the Present, at war for the Future on Wundagore’s surface, would not pause its battles to wait on her pleasure. It would, in fact, be all too eager to bring that war explosively down on her head at any moment, no matter how holy the darkness it would shatter.

War was always like that; the unrepentant iconoclast, the ultimate atheist, even when fought in the name of God.

She let herself sink down at a steady rate. A storybook memory in a language she could not read; something about a rabbit hole, and a picture of a falling girl. Wanda ghosted her fingertips between the wandering hand prints, the ancient stories, and the spiraling crystal veins that wove like incense smoke through the rock as she let the ancient air bear her down to the cavern’s earthen floor. 

Or rather, to just above the floor. 

Because something deep and primal made her stop before her boots touched the mounded dust beside the shallow pool. The rubble from above lay about the chamber floor like fire-blackened skulls and shattered sprays of teeth, far less of it at this depth than it had seemed there must be when it had been falling on her head. Wanda could feel a subtle warmth radiating from the shielded lantern beside the water, next to the wide smudge of ochre on the plinth where Babka Dynya had crouched and kneaded clay in her dream.

“I can’t wear shoes here,” Wanda realized, then flinched as her boots loosened, laces slithering out of their holes, scarlet bands tugging snug leather loose as the Red suited action to words.

“Wanda,” a very modern ghost breathed from centuries away and just behind her ear, “Wanda, report!”

She set her bare feet down in dust as soft, deep, and warm as fur, and bent to pick up the lantern. “I know where I am,” she said, realizing only as she said the words that they were true. “And I know where you are.”

She turned the lantern’s shield, flicked the wick awake with a spark of heat, and then held it aloft to see what she knew would be there. “I know where all of them are – all that are left. Everything that doesn’t belong here.”

The light of yellow fire brought it all to life; painted shadow and perspective across a hundred thousand years of history and rippling stone. They perched like vast and ancient Gods around the deep shaft’s perimeter.

She turned a slow circle, watching the shadows of the cavern – streaks of ochre, black, and white in stone and paint and shadow – ripple and bleed in the ghost of light-that-was, taking shape and depth and filling the ledges up along the round chamber’s walls with the seeming of hunters’ Saints; ancient, patient, and huge.

“Go help Steve,” she sang to the ghosts behind her ear as the silent Gods around her roared in welcome, “I’ve got this!”

~* Sam Wilson *~

“I got incoming!” Sam managed through the horror that gripped his throat. “Three coming up fast by the road!” He had to shout over the cat’s scream and the beeping of proximity alerts. “Scans show fully armed combatants onboard in riot gear.” The scanner flashed scarlet, a higher tone, and he cussed again. “And two airborne inbound from the south valley. You got that sniper yet?”

He could just see Barnes in the pit, one vast dark patch against a brindle of other cooling pelts. He hadn’t gone still yet. Steve was barely visible under the heaving pile of wolves.

“I got one of them,” Natasha clipped, rage bleeding accent into her reply, “The other is in a cloaking suit. I have no shot from here.”

Sam swore, leaning over to shove the cat out of his way and reach for the firing controls. “That’s SHIELD tech, isn’t it?”

“Cover me,” was her only answer as the Falcon wings extended, chiming like bells over the comm channel.

“Right,” he said, dropping the Quinjet’s nose as the firing com came up in response to his touch, “Fish in a barrel it is.” 

And he shot, fraying the pack at the edges, punching holes in their numbers as close as he dared to where Steve was still, miraculously, managing to hang on to the scrap of ground at the pit’s edge. The airborne bogeys were pinging furiously as they converged on the lodge, and the incoming humvees already had armed soldiers leaning out the sides to take aim as they came up the road. Sam ignored them though, figuring he had a few more seconds left to even Steve’s odds before the guns arrived, and by God, that was what he was gonna do!

It wasn’t clean shooting though. The Quinjet was fighting the mountain’s updrafts, as well as those caused by the weapons kickback, and Sam couldn’t hold it steady without both hands. But he also couldn’t get fine firing control without both hands, and that meant he was making a mess of both tasks as the jeeps crested the ridge and came skidding into the clearing.

“Aight,” he gritted, dropping altitude again and wheeling to face them, “I got you. Y’all just line up nice and pretty for me...” And that was when the hand fell onto his shoulder, gripped just shy of crushing bone, and shoved Sam firmly into the pilot’s seat. 

He grunted and turned, reaching for his gun, but the man – the naked man – standing behind his seat slapped it spinning from Sam’s grip as soon as it cleared the holster. 

“Don’t shoot,” he said, pointing at the jeeps on the HUD display, “Not those.” Then he hooked a thumb at the jump hatch in the rear, and added, “Let me out.”

“You-” Sam sputtered, shivering against the sudden dump of adrenaline in his already keyed up system. “How did you even get-”

And the man grinned then, teeth bright against swarthy skin, tawny eyes all amusement under the shaggy shock of his reddish brown hair. “The pretty girl trick me. You saw.” He pointed at the rear hatch again then, and added, “Now you work door.”

Sam stole a glance at the firing com – just enough to establish that yes, the soldiers on the jeeps were herding the wolves into a tighter knot, and the shooters weren’t aiming at the lodge – then he forced himself to put both hands on the flight control. It couldn’t be. It was utterly against the laws of physics, both Newtonian and Quantum, but there was really only one answer for what was going on here.

“These friends of yours?” he asked, nodding at the HUD, and getting a not-very-patient nod in return.

Well. Well, okay then.

“You got thumbs now, Kitty,” Sam told the man who had been a cat when they’d taken off, “You can work the door yourself.” He dropped the Quinjet lower still as the man headed aft, angling for a drop zone between the lodge and the wolf mob, and hoping that fifteen feet was more of a standing vertical jump than a werewolf could make. “It’s the red lever on the right side,” he said as the hydraulics hissed, “Wait till the ramp stops before you-”

He didn’t wait, of course.

Which meant that his man-sized body passing through the sensor grid triggered the hatch’s anti-crush subroutine. Which meant that the ramp fucking _froze_ in that half-open position, and Sam was gonna have to damned well land the jet in order to get back there and do a manual override to get it closed again, Goddamnit!

It was a hard, ugly landing. 

Sam tried not to think about the screaming and jostling against the Quinjet’s hull as he bolted from his seat and ran for the jump hatch, his second gun already cocked in hand, with a round in the chamber, because god _damn_ that was a lot of tooth and claw going on out there! He jammed his hand on the security scanner and shot through the hatch at a pair of wolves that looked like they were gauging their chances at getting inside.

“Guys?” he called, as soon as he could tap his com to life, “Shit’s about to get all Thriller up here, okay? Because we got two airborne of unknown provenance incoming, and we got a player three on the ground who just entered the game for reals, and-” The override finished running at last, slamming the ramp up in the snouts of three more of the pack’s stragglers.

Sam sagged against the icy metal wall for a shaking breath, then added, “And I’ve decided I want some better armor before I have to ever deal with lycanthropes again please.”

Then he shoved himself upright and ran for the pilot’s seat, and the HUD that would offer him his only view of what was happening outside before it was all over. He slapped on the Quinjet’s landing lights and deck monitors as soon as he reached the cockpit, then set them to record too. God knew what kind of proof they might have to provide of this ‘no shit, there I was’ circus once all the fur was done flying.

Somehow, against the odds anybody sane would have given him, the golden wolf had managed not only to hold his sliver of ground, but he’d managed to shake off and break up the dogpile as well. Not without paying for it, Sam noticed, watching him shift his weight to favor a bleeding hind leg. Steve was bloodied all over, his sides heaving under the thick, dark slick of it, and there was no way to tell from here how much of the blood on his hide had started the night out in his veins.

Behind Steve’s bristling hackles, by some fucking miracle of super soldier endurance, or stupid Irish fucking luck, Sam could see the bear was not only still alive in that pit, but was trying to find leverage to get out of it. He was grunting in frustration, clawing at the pit’s edge – and fucking hell man, that pit was twelve feet deep if it was an inch – but somehow Barnes was reaching the lip of it. And Steve… Steve was clearly determined to take the throat out of any wolf who tried to stop him.

Distracted by the arrival of the jeeps and armed men, however, the pack’s attention and attack formation had split, then reformed as a two-faced arc across the clearing. Tails pressed to tails, and teeth toward the jeeps, or the pit, depending; the fallen and injured found what protection they could under the feet of those still fit to fight.

Sam looked for the skinny black wolf, but didn’t find him in the line. It wasn’t until the HUD clocked movement at the side of the pit, where the smashed remains of Russoff’s chair had come to ground, that he spotted it, torn and limping, but digging frantically at the mounded snow beneath one of the fir trees. Sam zoomed the camera in, trying to figure out what he was after, but it wasn’t until the blood-matted fur swept away into pale skin and the wolf came to his feet as a man that Sam clocked the Uzi in his hands. 

And by then, of course, it was too late. Sam could have spun up the Quinjet’s guns, but not before Russoff could open up in full auto on Steve, and the pit he guarded.

Russoff shouted something in Russian, his attention split between the jeeps and the Quinjet, and Sam didn’t figure he needed the ship’s translation mode to tell him it was an order to back down. Still, he tapped the onboard AI awake, just in case his demands got interesting. 

And that was when the naked man Sam had let out of the Quinjet, swarthy and tall with shaggy hair the color of dried blood, and a necklace of three claws on a string, eased from beneath the pines at the would be dictator’s back and shouted an order of his own. 

“Take shape, Russoff.”

The pale kid skittered away, bare feet skidding in muddy snow, though to his credit, kept his gun trained on Steve as he did so. “Why should I?” he shouted back once he’d recovered his cool, or what passed for it.

Little Brother, or whatever his name actually was, only stalked forward, unhurried and implacable as Russoff backed toward the line of wolves as if that would change anything. “Take shape,” he said again, a definite rumble behind the words, “and fight me.”

“Fight you?” Russoff laughed, shrill and manic, “Black faced peasant, I would not sully my-”

“Then all these,” the cat replied, with a sweep of his arm toward the wolves, “they know you for coward. Who will do what you say then, _Wailos_?” The translator stumbled over the word, but Sam didn’t figure it needed much interpretation, given the way Little Brother spat it. “You will starve alone, if your pack does not turn on you first. Fight me,” and here, finally, he stopped and folded his arms across his chest in a blatant dare. “Or else try to run, and see how far you get.”

There were people climbing off the crowded jeeps now. Not many – Sam spotted three, and thought maybe two more might be coming down the back side. They moved with confidence, but without any sign of military training as they fanned out and – there were five after all – began to methodically… strip?

Russoff threw a panicky glance at the new development, and surged a few steps closer to Steve, shouting, “Stay back! I will kill him!”

To this, Little Brother shrugged, then chuckled as Steve’s halfhearted, but defiant lunge drove the kid back toward his pack again. “Then his pack will kill yours,” he said, waving a negligent hand toward Sam in the Quinjet, “and then they will kill you. I will watch them. Maybe help. And then I will take your hunting range without a fight, and the Moon will never find wolves on this mountain again.”

The villagers – because now that they’d come out into the Quinjet’s lights, Sam realized that was exactly who the people in the humvees and on the ground were – all stood waiting, watching Little Brother while their breath steamed in the cold they otherwise seemed not to feel at all. Russoff shot them a panicky glance, noticing, even as Sam did, that one of the naked villagers was the child who had brought Sam the remains of Cap’s uniform earlier that afternoon.

Then rage washed, florid and steaming over the man’s pallor, and he spat – as in, literally expectorated – at his challenger. “And who do you think you are, to threaten me, Peasant?” he bawled, a few of the wolves taking up his tone like baying hounds on the hunt.

This time, the cat did not smile. 

“I am Iarilo Triglavich Yamnyakhov, of clan Dragorin,” he snarled, fingers curling around the claws at his neck, “And you, _Wailos_ , are on MY land!” The leather cord snapped, and he threw it like a gauntlet at Russoff’s feet, “So take shape and fight for it! I will not tell you again!”

~* Steve Rogers *~

Steve hadn’t understood a word of the interaction, but he’d seen what happened in the wolf pack as the newcomer and his allies had surrounded them, and he could read the signs of unrest clear as day.

The rest of the wolves had quieted as the man had issued his challenge to their leader, clearly rattled from whatever loyalty or obligation had brought them to Russoff’s call. A few obvious hardliners agitated where they could, snarling and lunging at their silent fellows, but in general, it was clear that the pack had lost its center, and was now as apt to fray as it was to hold fast, no matter the outcome of the impending fight.

The newcomer was, apparently, a challenger the pack took more seriously than they did the alpha who claimed to speak for them. And whether Russoff could beat his rival in a fair fight or not, there was only one way a would-be leader could be expected to respond to that indignity.

Especially one who had proven himself willing to rely on treachery already. So the minute Russoff hurled the Uzi unfired at his challenger and dropped to all fours in a black sweep of fur, Steve knew just what he had in mind to do. And when the black wolf raised his throat to signal his snipers again, Steve lunged straight for it.

It was a good leap, even with his left hind leg aching and torn and his shoulder so deeply bruised he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t broken. Steve could tell he’d ranged the leap just right. Which made it quite a shock when he missed the black wolf entirely.

Because a tiger had knocked the wolf tail over heels first.

Steve stumbled, slid badly in the snow as his target tumbled yelping out of his range, and the tiger ambled unhurried after it without giving Steve a second glance. By the time Steve got his feet properly under him again, there were five more tigers plowing into the scattering ranks of wolves.

If this ever had been something so polite as a duel, it was clearly no such thing anymore. 

And amid the screams and roars, all Steve could do was scramble back to the pit where, despite his injuries and confusion, Bucky still struggled to dig free. Steve didn’t know how long it would take the tigers to scatter the wolf pack, and he didn’t know if they would be inclined to chase the wolves down as they ran, or to turn their attention to prey that was trapped close by, but presumably no less unwelcome.

He dug at the pit’s edge, flinging ice and dirt behind him, and trying not to let the sound of the carnage, the smell of blood and piss and terror, shove his mind down under the whelming rise of instinct inside him. He needed to think, not just react. He needed to plan, because if the animal took over here, there would be no way he could ever get Bucky free in time.

Wounded and confused, his massive head sheeted in blood, the bear in the pit understood enough of what was going on that he dug in concert with Steve’s efforts instead of trying to grab him and pull him in. The bodies of the pack who had gone into the pit before Bucky had, apparently, rendered the spikes at the bottom into little more than caltrops to the bear’s thick hide,. With the dirt he’d pulled from the pit’s sides himself, there was not a lot left of the sharpened spikes to worry about. But it was still too steep a climb for a bear with only three legs to make. Especially with the potential of attackers or _snipers_ awaiting his first vulnerable moments.

As if summoned from his fears, Steve heard Russoff give that high, yipping howl again – just as shrill as before, but with a desperation replacing the sound’s earlier gleeful cruelty. He stole a glance and found that the tigers had herded the surviving wolves into a fearful, huddling knot in the clearing, and were now standing obvious guard while their leader calmly backed the black wolf up to the Quinjet’s very hatch.

The wolf howled again, anger resonating through the fear this time, but instead of shots, his answer came as a rush of lift-jets, and Natasha swooping from the trees on Falcon’s wings. She dropped a dead man into the snow at the black wolf’s feet before alighting on the Quinjet’s cabin and asking in English, “Looking for this?”

“Or this?” Rhodes’ voice came at her heels. But what he dropped like trash into the mud was a 50 caliber minigun with a conspicuous knot tied in the barrel, and the remains of its deck mount a twisted wreck beneath it.

“Oh, was I supposed to bring those HYDRA strike drones I shot down in the valley?” Tony’s voice came from almost directly above, and Steve couldn’t restrain a tiny yip of joy when he looked up to find the Iron Man hovering above the pit, palm repulsors up in conspicuous defense. “Sorry. I didn’t know we were bringing trophies.”

“And in case you’re thinking of setting off any bombs,” Rhodes continued, landing between the cornered wolves and their leader. “We found them. All of them.”

Natasha smirked, and said something in Russian to the black wolf, and Steve didn’t need to understand the words in order to hear the goad. It was the last straw, the final insult the beaten wolf was willing to take. Steve could practically see the veil of rage descend over the black wolf’s mind as he leapt, roaring for the Widow’s throat.

Natasha fired the Falcon rig’s jump jets at once, but in truth she needn’t have bothered. The tiger chief’s leap was faster, surer, and utterly without mercy. 

The black wolf had no time to scream.

~* Tony Stark *~

The wolves broke in panic, scattering in all directions in the time honored escape strategy of ‘I-don’t-have-to-outrun-them-just-you’. There were only around fifteen of them left now, and while the tigers did turn to chase them, Tony could tell there was an air of ‘give-them-a-head-start-and-make-it-more-fun’ to the cats’ indolent pursuit.

Most of the tigers chased them, that is. 

The big one was still making a mess out of the heir apparent to the Transian political crime family, but another, smaller one had decided that Steve, digging frantically at the edge of the pit again, was something that needed dealing with more immediately.

“Tony,” Rhodey warned on the closed channel as the armed men and women leaned out of the humvees, “Tony, don’t you get-.”

“Involved,” Tony finished, accelerating to put the suit between Steve, the guns, and the oncoming cat, “Very definitely involved here already Gumdrop, and protected species or not, I’m-” 

Which was when the big one, the Shere Khan of the bunch, took simultaneous notice, and offense at the other cat’s objective.

He stood up with a roar, the white fur of his face and chest drenched with the wolf’s blood, and he charged at the smaller cat. It skittered aside with a protesting snarl, and then joined the chase they could all still hear out in the darkened woods. Then Khan gave a roar at the watching villagers too, and the guns were abruptly put away.

“Self-policing, Tones,” Rhodey said, the warning in his tone more personal than it had been before, “We got no voice in this court.”

And it was on the tip of Tony’s tongue to call bullshit; to point out that Steve’s presence, bloodied and weary, and still trying to save Barnes gave them the right to speak; that the pile of bombs they’d spent the last two hours locating and disarming gave them the right to be heard. But before he could find the words, Tony felt a solid, weighty press against his right leg, and looked down to find the golden wolf sliding right out of his sheltering cover toward the tiger that was at least twice his size.

Because of _course_ , Steve Fuck You Rogers couldn’t just sit back and let a fight go by without him. Of _course_ not!

“Seriously?” Tony blurted at him, suddenly furious, “You’re gonna do this? When you can’t even walk straight?”

Steve twitched a bloodied ear in Tony’s direction, but otherwise ignored his complaint. He limped determinedly toward where Shere Khan waited for him, while in the pit, Bucky the Yes-I’m-A-Fucking-Bear-And-By-The-Way-Fuck-You-Steve began to moan and bellow and throw himself at the walls in scrambling fury. And while Tony absolutely agreed with the sentiment, he was stuck between the urge to repulsor the tiger in its head, to blow the humvees up, or to zoom over there, grab Steve by the scruff of his neck like a naughty puppy, and fly him off for a long, hard talking to.

Just outside the tiger’s reach, perhaps eight or ten feet away, Steve stopped walking and just... laid down. Chin in dirt, ears low in what, on any canine who was not also Captain God Damn It America, would have looked like submission. But this was Steve, and so the very tip of his tail was swishing with excitement as the tiger got to its feet with a snarl.

_Fuck,_ Tony realized, raising his hands, _Fuck, I can’t just..._

But the tiger bunched low to the ground instead of surging across the gap; it bunched low and … wiggled its butt? It was such an absurd, obvious tell that it turned the following leap into something like a joke. 

Then, when Steve belly-scooted forward and nipped at the tiger’s tail as it sailed over his head – well then, it became clear that not only was it a joke, they both thought it was a fucking hilarious one too. Even the watching militia got the joke when Shere Khan whipped around and sent Steve tumbling with an obviously clawless swat to the head. When Steve rolled to his feet again, it was more than just the tip of his tail that was wagging.

“Oh, are you fucking serious?” Tony shouted as Steve charged the tiger, bounded off a tree, and planted one big paw on the cat’s head as he leapt over it. A few of the villagers shouted, clapping approval at the acrobatics, especially when the cat came up with snow all over its face.

“Doesn’t look like it to me,” Natasha answered, looking not remotely angelic in her borrowed wings and stolen furs, with the sniper’s rifle cradled in her arms like a baby. She was grinning too, clearly unbothered by the game of tag that was going on below.

It took Wilson, finally, to talk sense the whole crowd could understand. “Aight, you two,” he boomed from the Quinjet’s external speakers, “I know you’re having fun, but the rest of us could use a nap, so will you _please_ just choose a winner and wrap it up here?”

Steve turned, as if to bark sass back at his friend, and thus missed the chance to dodge when Khan bowled him over in the snow, and this time, kept hold. When they stopped rolling Khan had Steve by the back of his neck, jaws clamped firmly enough to lift the wolf off the ground and give him a shake, but to Tony’s relief, not firmly enough to crush the big idiot’s spine and kill him. 

The watching militants broke out in cheers, as if a bar bet had just been won. And that, of course, was when Barnes finally made it out of the pit.

He was mad enough that, even in the armor, Tony felt justified in getting some altitude. He didn’t want to be in the way when Had-Enough-Bear decided that kitty needed dealing with. 

But as soon as Steve yelped and squirmed against his grip, Shere Khan let him loose, backing a few steps as Steve scrambled to slow Bucky’s roll, and then strolling calmly back to where he had dropped Russoff the Younger’s black, furry corpse. This, he picked up by the spine, and then he carried it calmly and proudly off into the darkened woods.

Then the Humvees started up, one by one by one, turned out of the yard and onto the road without any apparent concern for the angry one-armed bear, or the wolf goading it into a ridiculously low-stakes, low speed game of tag by way of a distraction.

Natasha dropped to the road beside the last of them, exchanged a few words with the driver as Wilson opened the Quinjet’s jump-ramp to Rhodey’s knock. They were talking about Wanda, and how she’d conscripted Tony’s sentry drones to become her flying monkeys down in the mines when Tony dropped to join them. 

“-got no idea _how_ she knew where to find them all,” Rhodes was saying as they watched Steve work Barnes down out of his mad-on, “but she was adamant, and Nat was calling for backup, so we headed up and went hunting.”

“And you didn’t answer any of my direct hails because?” Wilson prompted, unimpressed.

Tony opened his face plate and grinned. “I’m gonna lay that on your glitchy Wakandan tech, personally,” he said, “Because I, for one, never heard a peep out of you. What?” He asked when Natasha materialized at his side with her hand held out, and that hypospray look on her face. “Not like it wasn’t obvious...” 

But she only wiggled her fingers at him and glared.

“So…” Wilson said as Tony retracted his gauntlet, and fished the gummy little comm-gel out from behind his ear, “We got at least a couple more hours till the moon sets, by my clock. And Steve’s...” Wilson nodded to where Barnes had dropped, grumbling onto his butt, and was now ignoring how Steve was leaning against his left side and staring up at him with weapons grade puppy dog face on. “Well, he’s doing okay, I guess, but what are we gonna do with an injured, three legged bear in the meantime?”

They all turned, considering. “We can’t just let him wander off,” Natasha mused. “Not with what’s out there tonight.”

“And we know he’s carrying an infectious strain,” Rhodes added, “So quarantine would be the ideal answer, but how the hell do we convince him to come inside the lodge?”

Tony looked at the pair – battered, bloodied, and still all but holding each other up in the cold wash of moonlight – and felt something that had been wound tight in his gut for a long time unclench. “Food,” he decided. “We raid the pantry, dig out everything; sweet, savory, fish, fowl, and fondue – everything but the weird mustard. We lay a trail to get Barnes inside, and then stay out of his reach until he passes out from blood loss, or a food coma, whichever comes first.” 

He turned, found all of them staring at him, and shrugged, a giddy certainty rising inside him. “It’s like my Nonna always said: there’s nothing for a bad mood like a good meal, right? So it’s time for an Avengers reunion supper!”

Wilson laughed aloud. Rhodey sighed, but with that little half-smile thing he always wore when he didn’t want Tony to know he was amused. And Natasha shrugged, tossing the sniper rifle back into the Quinjet with a clang. 

“I could eat,” she said, and headed back into the lodge.


	10. Augury

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Answers, illusions, and portentious questions.

~*Russoff hunting lodge, Mt. Wundagore, Transia *~  
~* Steve Rogers *~

Steve lay on his back, legs splayed, belly exposed to the air, pretending to sleep as the long night silvered edgewise into dawn. But he was actually reveling in the utterly alien feeling of not being self-conscious in the least.

It wasn’t something he could remember having experienced in his whole life, this freedom from expectation, this utter absence of any give-a-damn what anyone might make of his dignity or the lack of it. He was sleepy, his back and legs, and – well, to be honest, his almost everything still hurt from the fight, but his belly was full, the mattress was soft, the lodge was warm, and it felt _good_ to sprawl like this; loose and naked and unashamed.

Bucky sprawled, just as naked, beside him – just where he’d fallen when the moon had given him back. He hadn’t twitched when Steve had cuddled up close, dragging the blanket in his jaws so Bucky wouldn’t get cold as the fire died, except for when he flopped his hand over Steve’s side and wound his fingers deeply into the fur. Something about that grip, solid and heavy despite unconsciousness, that made Steve absolutely reject the idea of shifting into a man again. That would, he knew, rob them both of this innocent comfort.

So there he’d stayed, dozing occasionally as he listened to Bucky snoring, and Stark holding not-so-private-as-he-probably-thought conversations with FRIDAY and with Colonel Rhodes from the inside of his helmet. 

The others had, on Rhodes’ insistence, retired to the safety of the Quinjet once Bucky began to show signs of his moonset change. Bitten shifters were, he insisted, at their most dangerous and infectious when they were actively in flux.

Natasha, who had been deeply enjoying her game of tossing pierogies at the bear from the top of the stairway and watching him snatch them out of the air, was the most vocal protest over the expulsion. But even she hadn’t argued for long when Steve had stared at her reproachfully and gently growled. Bucky deserved more dignity than to be a spectacle for the curious, after all he’d gone through already.

Tony had stayed though, after promising Rhodes faithfully that he would remain armored, not pick a fight with the super soldiers, and also not try and take on the Tigrathropes if they should happen to come back to the lodge looking for a fight before Rhodes got back from calling his relatives in Louisiana.

Rhodes’ skepticism had been palpable, even through the armor’s impassive face. Steve was sure if the Colonel hadn’t been more worried about getting a copy of the security footage of the fight into his relatives’ hands before the rumor mill could turn against them, he might have stayed in the lodge too.

But he had gone, and Tony had remained behind to sit the restless vigil of the night that remained in his hot rod armor. He’d seemed content with Steve’s condition once Rhodes told him that he could probably shift back to human when he pleased, and had commented, ostensibly to himself, that it was actually a relief not to have to make small talk. 

Steve had agreed. Then he’d closed his eyes, snuggled into Bucky’s hold, and just reveled in being wholly, unashamedly, indulgently _himself_ , with no shadow of Captain America anywhere to be found.

Though of course, it couldn’t last.

“Mph...” Bucky grunted, his fingers digging deep at the fur of Steve’s shoulder as wakefulness crept up on him. Then he made a feeble attempt to stretch, and pulled back his hand, groaning instead. “Ugh. Fuck...”

Steve let himself be rolled by the movement, and to his surprise, saw the Iron Man armor, dull and strange to his wolf eyes, leaning low over Bucky, as if to help him sit up. “Yeah,” Tony’s digitized voice answered quietly. “That’s a fair description.”

Steve tensed, ready to lunge in case Bucky came up swinging, but relaxed again when Bucky only cussed under his breath and grabbed the offered hand in his. “T’hell happn?” he muttered as he sat up, blinking and squinting at the arc reactor’s glow.

Tony’s helmet opened with a whoosh of canned air and human sweat. “So to recap,” he offered quietly, passing Bucky a bottle of water, “It’s 2016, you’re in Transia, squatting in the Presidential hunting lodge, recovering from having turned into a bear last night-”

Bucky choked on the water.

“But,” he managed, ducking away with a glare when Tony tried ‘patting’ him on the back, “I don’t-”

“I have video,” Tony answered, and the armor began to segment and retract into itself, “You were totally a bear. And not the cute kind they sell at FAO Schwartz, either. No little blue jacket anywhere to be found, trust me.”

Bucky stared at Tony for a long moment, clearly waiting for Tony to either spring the punchline, or continue spinning out the monkeyshine. After a moment though, he seemed to realize that he was getting no such reprieve, and took a look around the room. Steve watched him take in the shattered furniture, gnawed and scattered bones, the remains of blankets, cushions and curtains, the piles of dishes and food containers still littering the kitchen island and dining table, Steve himself – he closed his eyes and twitched his leg as if dreaming – and finally, his own naked, filthy state.

Then Bucky sighed, braced his arm across his bent knees, and dropped his forehead down onto it, muttering, “Wish I could say this was the weirdest thing anybody’s ever said I did...”

“Well, if it helps,” Tony offered, shaking out a thick white bathrobe and tossing it over Bucky’s head, “This time I’m pretty sure you didn’t kill anybody who wasn’t out to kill you first.”

“Not all that comforting, really,” Bucky sighed, taking the robe and slinging it around his shoulders, “given the number of people who’re still out to kill me.” He started to lever himself up, but then stopped with a telling wince. “The fuck happened to my back?”

“I’m… gonna let Wilson and Rhodey explain that one to you,” Tony said with a grimace as he rubbed at his neck, “But I will say that gravity was involved, and that you are lucky in a way that makes the scientist in me deeply uncomfortable.”

Bucky sighed, and shook his head. “Fuckin’ luck of the Irish,” he said with a mirthless laugh, “Not good for much of anything except for failing to fuckin’ die.” Then he noticed the hand Tony was holding out to him, and gave it a skeptical once over before taking it and letting himself be hauled to his feet. “We going somewhere?” he asked, and to Steve it sounded effortfully casual.

“Upstairs,” Tony answered, releasing Bucky’s hand at once, and turning toward the stairs, “You smell like a bear, and you’re covered with werewolf gore, so: shower.”

“Aw hell,” Bucky sighed, opening the robe for another look. “Thought it was mud.”

“Oh, it’s that too,” Tony offered, leading him toward the stairs, “And pancake syrup, two kinds of jelly, barbecue sauce, and I’m pretty sure there’s some fireplace ash in the mix too, ‘cause you got pretty excited when the pierogies started flying.”

Steve let his tongue loll out in private amusement as Bucky groaned, “You have video of that too, don’t you?”

“Every minute of it,” Tony confirmed mercilessly, “All it needs is a backing track of Yakkity Sax, and it’ll be comedy gold.”

“Well, I guess a fella who runs around in a red metal clown suit would know his way around comedy, so I’ll just take your word for it,” Bucky shot back. If he hadn’t been busily playing possum, Steve could have cheered to hear the old, easily familiar shit-giving tone in his friend’s voice.

“Oh, is that how it is? You wait till Cap’s asleep, and then you’re busting my chops again?”

Steve peered at the upstairs hallway, worried until he saw the wry quirk on Bucky’s answering grin. “Figured you knew I was perfectly happy to bust your chops when Steve’s awake too, Stark,” he said, turning in at the biggest bedroom.

Tony threw the bird after him, but waited in the hall, looking weary, rumpled, and yet comfortable in his skin in a way that Steve almost never got to see the man. He leaned beside the open door as the distant shower began to run; not checking his phone, or peering at a tablet, nor even muttering instructions to FRIDAY on some hidden earpiece. He just stood there, head pressed back to the wall, the long line of his throat exposed to the air in a way that Steve thought he probably shouldn’t find quite so endearing, given the shape he was currently wearing.

But he did find it endearing, and with the complicated caul of shame, regret, and human ego pushed to an ignorable distance, Steve found himself quite willing to lie there, slit-eyed in the growing dawnlight, and look his fill. Because soon enough, day would come. Rhodes would return from his inter-species peacekeeping mission, and they would all have to decide what to do next. Where to go, who could hear the truth, who would have to lie, who could go openly home, and who would have to slink home in secret, if they got to go home at all.

So this... might be the only time Steve would get for looking his fill of Tony Stark for a long while.

“Been wondering something, Stark,” Bucky’s voice drifted from the still-darkened room, low and resonant over the hiss of falling water.

“Thong, upright center tuck,” Tony answered without moving.

Steve took a private moment to consider with gratitude the fact that wolf fur would almost certainly hide his rosy Irish blushes from the world from now on. Strike one point into the ‘not so much of a curse as all that’ category.

“Ha ha no,” Buck called back, arid and wry, “What I wanted to know, is if you’ve actually ever _told_ him.”

 _No,_ Steve thought, hair rising along his spine as a horrified alarm washed over him. _No, Bucky, don’t you dare!_

Tony cast a look, equal measures puzzled and annoyed, through the open doorway. “I tell a lot of people a lot of things in any given day,” he groused, “And given the number of them who don’t listen at all, I’m gonna need a little more specificity on thi-”

“Have _you_ ,” Bucky said, deliberate and merciless, “ever told _Steve_ how you feel about him?”

Steve swallowed down the urge to whine in distress. Bucky _knew_ how much Steve hated it when he did this matchmaking thing! He _knew_ it just made Steve feel angry, empty, and worthless every time yet another Someone danced around the inevitable ‘yeah-he’s-great-but-not-my-type’ reply.

Sure enough, Tony snorted – amusement, or derision, or maybe both. “Oh, he knows,” he said, “Trust me on that one.”

 _There, Buck,_ Steve thought, letting his eyes fall closed again in defeat. _Now let it go. We both know how this ends, and I don’t need to hear the rest._

But of course, he did not. It was Bucky, after all, and he loved Steve far too damned much to understand that other folks just… didn’t. “So he knows,” he pressed, “because you’ve _told_ him that you’re emotionally invested in him, personally?”

 _That he’s what?_

“That I’m _What_?!” Tony yelped, coming off the wall like it had stung him.

“Or have you just hung around,” Bucky went on, cruelly oblivious, “insulting him to his face, making cow eyes where he can’t see, throwing gifts and money at him, and expecting that he’d read your mind with no actual words necessary?”

Steve lay perfectly, achingly still, eyes clenched shut, ears quivering as Tony stomped, blustering into the bedroom.

“You!” he’d clearly forgotten he was supposed to be whispering, “Why would you even!? Frostbite! In the brain! Permanent damage!”

“And yet that’s not a ‘no’, is it?”

“I,” And oh, but Steve could just imagine the way Tony would be drawing himself up on that word, one hand spread over his chest as if anybody could be uncertain to whom that word referred, “happen to have a Pepper!” 

And Steve relaxed with a very quiet, and really not disappointed at all, groan. Because of course they’d made up after Siberia. Tony had said outright that he’d backed the Accords to get Pepper back, so of course they were… together again. 

Tony’s only emotional investment in Steve was secondhand, and built on Howard’s obsessive neglect. Whatever kernel of connection they might have been able to nurture in that shadow, the combined weight of HYDRA, Ultron, and Zemo had ultimately destroyed. They were friends now, in the wake of Steve’s near-death – barely, but that was enough to be going on with for him.

“I mean,” Tony went on after a long and heavy silence, “I had a Pepper. And I have had a Pepper the entire time he was even around, even if we’re on a break right now. So why would I have gone… _yearning_ after Cap like some side hustle when I had-”

“Steve,” Bucky corrected, “Is _nobody’s_ side hustle.”

“Exactly! And that’s why I would nev-”

“Except mine.”

Steve groaned, and gave in to the urge to cover his face with his paw, because _damn it, Bucky!_

The shocked silence coming from the upstairs bedroom could have crushed a tank for sheer metric tonnage until Tony coughed, and managed. “Excuse me?”

“You heard.”

“I...” Tony coughed again. “I thought you two were, um…?”

“We are,” Bucky answered, smug, “Um. But that don’t mean we’re _only_ Um, and that don’t mean we’re the only Um for each other.” The water shut off, and Bucky continued, briefly towel-muffled, “Don’t take me wrong, Stark, I ain’t tryin to give him away, or set up a three way fling or anything. I’m just askin’ how things are with you and him, so I’ll know how things stand from here on in.”

“Oh, like I’d want to come between the two of you-” Tony began, prompting Steve’s brain to remind him of that whole no-blushing advantage again.

Bucky laughed, low and almost mean. “Believe me, Stark,” he said, ignoring the obvious joke, “If HYDRA couldn’t come between us, then you can’t. We’ll still be for each other, but we ain’t gonna be each other’s only – never have been. I had my girlfriends, he had Carter, and that Roth kid for awhile, but there was always _us_ behind the rest. So that ain’t gonna change. You ain’t taking Steve away from me, but I ain’t keeping him away from you either. Still, if that ain’t something you can cope with, I figure it’s best you know about it up front, before you set your cap toward something that ain’t on offer.”

Steve could feel his heart thudding in his chest, foot-tangled and tripping over love, and joy, and a sloppy, shaking relief to hear Bucky say in as many words that he _remembered_. Skipping around a nervy, bumbling fear that Stark’s reckless wit and sharp tongue would make a joke out of the one precious thing the world had ever let Steve fight for and keep.

“Um.” It was all Tony could manage for a long moment, and Steve listened to the towel-rubbing sounds, then the getting dressed sounds. He tried not to let his heart sink over the length of that wordless silence, and how fast and far that genius brain could be running in such a long time. It was better than a joke… but not by much.

“I… don’t think Steve thinks of me as a friend, to be honest,” Tony began, cautious and quiet, and Steve’s heart broke a little bit more to hear it.

Bucky’s laugh was neither cautious, nor quiet. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you when he thinks you’re too distracted to notice, buddy,” he said, “I don’t think he thinks of you as a friend either. But if you ain’t told him up front that you’re interested, he ain’t gonna be the one to let himself imagine it’s so.”

“I never said I was interested,” Tony’s protest was quick enough, but even he didn’t sound convinced of it.

Bucky ignored it altogether. “I’ve seen Stevie talk himself right out of a hundred fair chances over the years,” he went on, “All on account of he doesn’t expect people to like him. That’s never been his lot.”

“That’s… He was a _celebrity!_ ” Tony protested, “Newsreels! Eight stupid wartime films! Medals of honor!”

“He’s a poor Irish kid from Brooklyn,” Bucky corrected, merciless. “He’d been overlooked and ignored for most of his life before Erskine found him. And after Rebirth, when he finally was visible, everybody wanted something from him – either the Uniform, or the Body. Neither of those was ever really him. Stevie never learned how to read genuine interest in people who didn’t walk right up and smack him in the mouth with their lips.”

Floorboards creaked a warning, and Steve snapped his eyes closed again, made himself sag limp and easy into the mattress as both men came back out onto the landing.

“I know what that feels like,” Tony’s voice dropped low again, and Steve could feel the weight of his gaze as they crossed out into the hallway overlook. “Being a commodity. A… prize. It sucks.”

“Yeah,” Bucky answered, “I thought maybe your problem was you’re too damned much alike. Still,” he trod down a few stairs, then turned back to challenge, “If you hadn’t had your Pepper back when he was in New York with you; would you have made a move?”

Steve couldn’t help it. He peeked. And found Tony flustered and blushing at the top of the stairs. “Umm…”

Bucky’s smirk grew teeth. “Would you have wanted to?”

“I mean, who wouldn’t?”

 _Most people, it turns out,_ Steve thought, taking shelter behind the familiar bitterness as hope tried to creep in.

“Not an answer, Stark,” Bucky singsonged. “I ain’t talking about _anyone_ , I’m talking about you.”

“I…” Tony ventured a few steps down, then paused in the face of Bucky’s unwavering stare. “I did want to,” he finally decided. “But Steve never seemed…” Steve held his breath as Tony’s eyes turned toward him again. “Well, I guess based on what you said, he wouldn’t, but...” He shrugged, hands jammed into his pockets. “Yeah. I wanted. Figured I couldn’t have it.”

It took all Steve’s focus to make himself keep still, and to _not_ leap to his feet, race up the stairs, and smack Tony Stark right in the mouth with his lips. Or maybe, since he didn’t have much lip to speak of like this, with his tongue. But he managed it _You’re eavesdropping, you idiot,_ he told himself sternly, _for God’s sake act like it!_

“So you didn’t say anything to him,” Bucky concluded, making no effort to hide the judgment as he turned and continued down the stairs. “Jesus, you two are exactly alike, aren’t you.”

“Excuse me,” Tony protested, chasing him, “Genius here!”

“And yet...”

Steve had to hold his breath then, as his internal mirth translated into the strongest urge to grin, wag his tail, and let his tongue loll out into the air. Whatever clapback Tony may have had in mind though, he stopped shy of it, sudden and still on the third stair from the bottom. When Steve peeked again, he found the man with one hand pressing at his ear.

“Rhodey’s inbound,” Tony announced then, perhaps the only topic-dodge Bucky would have let him skate by on without a fight. “ETA thirty minutes. I’ll go and shake the others up for breakfast. Which, by the way, you two get to cook.” He tipped a nod at the downright wreck they’d left in the kitchen, and then slipped past Bucky to head for the front door. “Assuming there’s any food we didn’t feed you last night, that is.”

And then he was gone, the glimpse of sky that flashed through the door as he left was a rosy amber, just heating up at the lower edge toward gold. A beautiful day for lost chances.

“I know you’re awake Steve,” Bucky said, just in time to remind Steve to quell the full-body sigh that wanted to roll out of him.

Steve made a grumbling moan instead, and rolled to burrow his face away from the growing light.

Bucky wasn’t buying though. “You’re an even worse liar in this form, you big idiot,” he yelled, “The end of your tail’s wagging!” 

Mortified, Steve whipped his head around to check, and then had to snatch from the air the remains of a throw pillow Bucky had pitched at his head. Steve gave the pillow a growl and shake as Bucky returned to the mattress and flopped out, long and damp and lovely beside him. His tail had _not_ been wagging!

“Don’t mess this up, Stevie,” Bucky said, ootching up to lay his dripping head across Steve’s flank, “You and Stark, you need to sort yourselves out. Everyone can see it, and if you can just let yourselves have this...” he looked up, earnest-eyed and pleading. “Would it be so bad to be happy for once, Stevie?”

Steve growled, and dropped the ragged pillow on his head. Bucky laughed, taking it for the declaration of love it always had been, and reached up to tangle his fingers in Steve’s shaggy ruff. 

“You know Stevie,” he said as Steve’s eyes crossed in a pleasure he’d never dreamed could be so simple and fine, “if it wasn’t for me, I don’t think you’d have anybody who understood you at all...”

~* Tony Stark *~

“What the hell is this supposed to be?” Tony demanded, staring at the plate Steve slid in front of him.

Steve gave him a look like butter wouldn’t melt on him, and pointed to the plate. “Fried dough, beans, powdered eggs.” Then he gave a bracing double clap to the outside of Tony’s shoulders and grinned. “Breakfast, as requested.”

“But what’s _that_?” Tony pressed, pointing gingerly at a semi-congealed puddle next to the crisped lumps of dough.

“Milk and pepper gravy,” Steve answered, doling out more full plates around the table, “For dipping.” Tony couldn’t help shuddering again. The beans looked vaguely threatening, lurking redly under the wobbly blanket of plain egg scramble.

“’T’s good,” Wanda declared, chewing, “Teach me how?”

“Sure thing,” Steve grinned setting the last plate in front of Rhodey and then taking his own seat on Tony’s other side. “Gravy’s easy. And also the best way to make it through ‘no groceries’ week.” 

“Aw now who let the Great Depression kids cook?” Wilson complained from the other side of the table. Then he had to duck the box of powdered sugar Barnes slung at his head from the kitchen.

“The Billionaire,” Barnes said, dropping the percolator full of grounds into the sink and bringing the enamel coffee pot to the table. “If you don’t like it, I’ll eat yours, and you can make your own breakfast.” At which point, Romanoff succinctly pushed her plate at Barnes, and stole the mug of coffee he’d poured for himself.

Tony seriously considered shoving his plate away too, but Steve’s eyes were on him, and there was a smudge of flour across his cheek and another on his shoulder, and he just… he couldn’t.

“I know I’ve had worse rations in the field,” Rhodey declared, tucking into the mess on his plate and so deliberately, conspicuously _not_ looking in Tony’s direction that Tony knew he wasn’t going to get a pass on eating it too.

“At least tell me you didn’t burn the coffee?” Tony pleaded as the blue enameled pot made its way around the scarred, propped-up dining table.

“Burnt coffee,” Steve scoffed, pouring out a cup and sliding it Tony’s way, “No such thing. If you can’t stand a spoon upright in it, you haven’t cooked it long enough.”

Tony felt the blood drain from his face. Still, the smell hooked him as he picked it up and drew it close – deep and rich, with notes of citrus and chocolate under the smooth weight, no trace of ashy bitterness to be found. And when he tasted it, the brew slid across his palate like a benediction of light from the heavens.

The noise he made would have gone viral, had it turned up on YouTube, and Tony completely didn’t care. He reveled in the feel of the brew scalding its way across his tongue, somehow thick and almost syrupy without having any sugar or milk added to cloud the flavor. He’d had espresso in Italy with less body and more bitterness to it. Tony had no idea how in the world they’d managed to make this out of frozen beans and a stove-top percolator, but right now he was ready to declare both of them geniuses on the strength of this cup alone.

He looked up to say so, and found Steve staring looking at him, eyes wide, jaw slack, cheeks a furious pink that set that smudge of flour on the right side into high relief. There was something both ‘deer in the headlights’ and ‘predator’s fixed stare’ in the expression, but before Tony could parse it out, Barnes made an obnoxiously loud slurp on the other side of the table, and Steve flinched away as if he’d been scalded.

Damn it.

“So Colonel Rhodes,” Steve yelped, “You, uh, said you had news?”

“Sure do,” Rhodey answered with that evaluating smirk Tony was deeply fucking _relieved_ to see aimed at somebody else for a change, “My great aunt watched the footage last night – both Russoff’s challenge, and the actual fight. Which, given that I had to have FRIDAY translate everything so she could understand it, took awhile.”

“So what’d she think?” That was Barnes, stabbing eggs and beans onto his fork and swirling them in the gravy like some kind of a culinary heathen, “Was it as much of a shit show as my achin’ back feels like it musta been?”

“Every bit as much,” Rhodey agreed, “Between you, Cap, Russoff, and the tigers, there were between four and eighteen severe breaches of tradition, depending on how you count them. She said if she’d only heard about the fight through gossip channels, she probably would have supported an intervention if anybody she trusted brought it up.”

“Intervention,” Steve observed, setting his fork down. “That mean what it sounds like?”

Rhodey nodded, stealing quick glances at Wanda and Natasha, who had stopped eating to stare at him with threatening neutrality. “The community self-polices in order to stop things like what happened last night from happening all the time.

“Somebody who wanted the wolves to remain dominant here could get folks coming down on the Tigers; somebody who wanted your head could convince a lot of Shifters that it needed taking, just by editing the facts one way or another. However,” he added, serving himself a few more of the weird little dough nuggets from the plate in the middle of the table, “My great aunt is a very social woman.” He paused to drive the point home with a stare that swept the table. “ _Very._ Social. She’s got friends all over the world, and let’s just say her phone carrier loses a lot of money on her unlimited minutes plan. Her having the whole story as it actually happened, complete with video back up, is just about the best insurance we could ask for against repercussions from last night coming around to bite us all in the asses.”

“What about the rest of us though?” Wilson asked, grabbing the coffee pot and pouring for Barnes, and then himself, “Me, Nat and Wanda, Stark; we know about the Morphotrhopes now; saw shit go down up close and personal; hell, we _interfered_. What are they gonna do about us?”

Tony opened his mouth to scoff, because what, really, could a bunch of werewolves do to him that Stane, the Ten Rings, Vanko, Loki, Killian, and Zemo hadn’t already tried. But Rhodey’s ice cold side-eye held the words back just long enough.

“Vangie says you’re pack now, essentially,” he told them, “Same way my Dad and my uncle Charles are pack, even though neither one has a drop of the changing blood.” He tipped a nod, “You’re all Steve’s pack. So if anyone in the Morphothrope community has a problem with something you know, see, say, or do, he’s the one they’re gonna bring it to.”

“So, about like normal then?” Barnes grumbled as Steve sighed and rolled his eyes.

“Why can’t I be in your pack?” Tony protested to Rhodey, only half serious.

“Cause I had enough of being responsible for your ass when I was liaising with SI for the Air Force,” Rhodey shot back. “Besides, Vangie says the community’s thought of the Avengers as a pack unto themselves since about the first moment you all appeared on the news. Roster changes and team breakups just look like normal pack politics far’s they’re concerned, and Cap’s always been the visible leader, so...”

Which was, Tony had to concede, fair, even though the idea chaffed hard against his daddy/abandonment issues. Well. He was getting kinda tired of those anyway.

“Well I, for one, welcome the advent of our super-soldier overlord,” Natasha announced after a moment’s silence, turning her chair so she could shove her feet into Barnes’ lap and lean on Wilson’s shoulder at the same time. “What other news did you get, Colonel?”

“Well, it’s not news yet,” Rhodey pushed his plate back, coy and smug at once, in that way he always got when he was about to solve a Hail Mary problem in front of an audience, “But it’s a working theory. Cap, while Aunt Vangie was watching the fight footage, she asked me who your people were.”

“Kilkenny Irish,” Barnes provided at once, sounding a little mystified. “Thought everyone knew that.”

“I didn’t know that,” Wanda observed, eating the last of the dough balls.

“I didn’t know the answer either,” Rhodey said, “so I asked FRIDAY to look it up, and-”

Steve groaned, hiding a blush behind one big palm. “She didn’t show you that Clan Club nonsense, did she?”

“’Fraid she did,” said Rhodey, not sounding regretful in the least.

“The what now?” Wilson asked, in the dangerous tone of a man who very much needed to be sure he’d heard that word spelled with a C and not a K.

“The Rogers Clan Club,” Tony explained, “It’s a bunch of people who have nothing better to do with their time than to do genealogical research to try and prove that they’re related to Captain America. It’s been around awhile, in the scary corners of the Internet, but once Steve made his miraculous comeback, it got really popular.”

“It got really _creepy_ ,” Steve corrected, “You know how many ‘family baptisms’ I’ve been invited to? And Bar Mitzvahs? I’ve had girls I don’t even know ask _me_ to send them virginity promise rings! And this one fella flat out _insisted_ I had to come walk his daughter down the aisle for her wedding, on account of we were second cousins five times removed!”

“SO anyway,” Rhodey cut through the rising tirade with his best officer voice, though a triumphant grin was beginning to creep past his guard. “She said your ma’s maiden name was Sorcha Delaney Osrahey, which got changed to Sarah Delaney Osroy on Ellis Island. That sound right?” 

“Yes...” Steve said with a narrow stare.

“Now Osrahey is a place name, according to FRIDAY. It’s derived from the name of a town in the Kilkenny area called Ossory, which is associated with the story of the-”

“Waitaminute!” Barnes jolted in his chair, like he would have shot to his feet if Romanoff’s legs hadn’t been holding him down. “Ossory? Like in that story with Saint Patrick? Steve, you never told me you were from Ossory!”

“That’s cause I’m from Brooklyn, Buck,” Steve growled, accent making that fact _very_ plain. “My Ma didn’t talk much about the old country. Said I was an American, and that was what mattered most, so-”

“So you probably never had much reason to wonder if you might be carrying the blood of a nearly-extinct Irish lycanthrope clan before now,” Rhodey hauled on the conversational reins triumphantly. “Which, it turns out, you almost definitely are. Really good coffee, by the way.” 

“Did you just?” Tony muttered as Rhodey hid a grin in his mug, but Steve’s heartfelt groan-and-facepalm distracted him just enough to notice Barnes’ utter glee.

“You’re _Faoladh_ , Stevie!” he crowed, pointing, “You totally are!”

Steve’s answer was mostly buried in his hand, but Tony was pretty sure he heard the words ‘fairy’ and ‘story’ in there somewhere. Which was pretty rich, given the circumstances.

“Okay first,” Wilson cut in with a glare, “You literally fought a were-tiger last night, Steve, so I think we’re a little bit beyond the storybooks here, and second, what the hell is a Fweyla?”

“Same as a Loup Garou or Lupescu, only Irish instead of Creole or Baltic,” Rhodey answered, smug as only a sower of chaos could be. “Blood wolves, who share their gift genetically, not virally, and who can shift when it suits them, not when the moon drives them to it. Time was, they ruled Ireland end to end, but they got hit hard by the Romans.”

“Everybody blames the Romans,” Tony complained mildly, fascinated despite himself.

“Only in Western Europe,” Natasha corrected. “We mostly blamed things like that on the Mongols.”

“Or the Turks,” added Wanda with a wave.

“Well, it was Christians in this case,” Rhodey drew them all back to the point. “According to Aunt Vangie, common understanding among the clans is that whatever of the Faoladh bloodline survived the Christian conversion and the Saxon, Norman, and Viking invasions got hunted down and eradicated by the Tudor court vampires in the Renaissance. The last of the clan’s human descendants was said to live near Ossory.”

“Again with the random vampires?” Tony wondered, but Wilson slapped the table before Tony could demand an answer.

“Epigenesis!”

“Gesundheit,” Steve answered, puzzled.

“The serum! Epigenesis is how it _works_!” Wilson went on, undeterred, “That’s why the virus didn’t run its normal course with you the way it did with Barnes; because when the virus attacked, the serum just… turned on those recessive genes you’ve had in there all along! Barnes’ serum didn’t have a genetic pattern for shifting to fall back on, so once his arm stopped suppressing the shift, he completed it. Steve,” Wilson leaned to grab at the man’s hand, “You didn’t give in to the virus at all; you adapted around it!”

“Um,” Steve blushed, “Go me?”

“And that,” Rhodey added, bemused, “is why my great aunt has extended an invitation to Cap and Barnes to go spend the rest of the winter down on the family’s Lake Pontchartrain estate. Because, to use her words, ‘y’all boys need some strong learnin on y’all fore you make yourselves a damn mess of things.’”

“Lake Pontchartrain?” Steve wondered. 

“Louisiana,” Barnes supplied, looking more than a little intrigued. “What’s the winter like in Louisiana?”

“Damn sight warmer than here,” Sam said, obviously jealous.

Steve put a hand up then. “Um… wanted felons here?” he pointed out, “How are we supposed to get to Louisiana?”

“Quinjet?” Wanda suggested.

“Doggie crate?” Tony counter offered.

“Orrrrr…” Romanoff took a loud slurp of her coffee, “You can give your great aunt a rain check. Because if I don’t take these two back where I found them within a few days, it’s fairly likely that the King of Wakanda and any number of his bodyguard would turn up at your great aunt’s family estate to fetch them.” Her smirk was anything but regretful as she added, “Speaking of international incidents and all.”

“They would?” Steve asked.

“Princess Shuri made me promise I’d bring you both,” Romanoff nodded.

“Ooh,” Tony realized suddenly, “I’ve met her! Nanotech security conference last year. She’s very…”

“Persuasive,” Barnes finished, “And stubborn. Little bit spoiled too, and I have a feeling she’s gonna see that bear problem as… a challenge.”

“Well,” Tony ventured, “I mean...”

“The bear’s _not_ a problem. Not unless you don’t learn to manage it,” Rhodey said, clearly putting his mental officer’s hat on, “Think of it like type 2 Herpes; you learn to watch for an outbreak, and take steps not to infect anybody else, but you can otherwise live a fairly normal… life…?”

Tony tried – he tried hard, okay – but he couldn’t quell a bit of glee at watching Mr. Smooth Talker Rhodes realize he’d waltzed into a minefield with the whole team watching. Usually it was Tony on the receiving end of the unified wall of ‘why-are-you-like-this’ stares.

“Nothing,” Barnes said, a long and awkward moment after the pep talk had trailed off into silence, “about my life for the last seventy years has been normal.”

“Man’s got a point,” Wilson observed. But whatever trauma counselor guidance he was about to slap down on the table wound up forgotten a second later, when someone knocked – pounded, really, – on the lodge door.

24 hours ago, that knock – and the implication that someone had been able to just walk through their security to get into knocking range – would have caused a unilateral adrenaline surge, and a charge for every weapon the team could bring to hand.

In the wake of last night though, it barely warranted a round of exhausted sighs, and a silent mutual evaluation as to who was least tired among them, and should therefore have to get up and go answer the door. Wanda threw herself on that one before the debate could evolve words, and Steve dragged himself along after her, as if he thought she might need protection, or maybe just for support, bless his heart.

Tony polished off the last of his beans and cold eggs (just as loathsome as he’d expected,) and wondered what it was going to take to find and reprogram the drones that _should_ have warned them to expect company well before it arrived. Damn this weird ass mountain and its weird ass energy, anyway! 

“I told the villagers we’d be leaving today,” Romanoff murmured as Wanda called out in Sokovian through the door. “I figured now Steve was safe to travel, we all should probably waste no time being somewhere other than here.”

“Amen,” Wilson breathed as a feminine voice answered Wanda’s query from beyond the door. 

“What I didn’t think about at the time though,” she went on as Wanda yanked the bar away from the lodge door and yanked it open, “was whether James would be safe to travel that soon.”

“It’s _Bucky_ ,” Barnes grumbled in the tone of the not-quite-resigned, “and I’m fine.”

“It’s only the first night of the full moon,” she pointed out, “And I’m fairly sure I do not want that bear inside the Quinjet with me at 35000 feet.”

“I’m _fine_ ,” he insisted again.

“He really is,” Rhodey added half a breath after. “Moon shifts usually only happen once per cycle, from what Vangie was saying. So unless someone makes him rage out on the flight back to Wakanda, he should be fine.”

“Why is everyone looking at me?” Tony complained as all heads at the table turned. 

Then he found himself flinching violently as the big ginger tomcat leapt into his lap like a half ton of hairy bricks with Very Long Claws. He managed no more than a squeak of manly alarm before the cat hopped up onto the table, and began licking the congealed gravy from his plate as if the two of them had been on non-face-eating terms all week.

“Oh hey, Iarilo,” Wilson said, aridly wry while Tony tried to get control of his lungs again, “Nice to see you again, dude. We’d have saved you some grub if we’d known you were coming.”

“Oh, Little Brother is not hungry,” a woman called from behind Tony, smirking like a cat herself as half the table jolted around to face her, “But he does appreciate gravy.”

She was sturdy and tall in her tactical black, with dark hair and eyes, and a pretty face that looked to be several decades away from that of the tiny, white haired granny holding her arm to cross the entry hall.

“I am Durya Laranova,” the woman told them with a pointed smile that lingered longest and fondest on Steve, “and I would like to officially welcome you to my Revolution.”

~*~

“But the village,” Wanda insisted as she helped Wilson pack the remains of the old woman’s ‘medical kit’ back up for transport, “Dragorin was empty! The houses wrecked! We thought...”

“Pssht,” the old woman said, watching them work from the one intact chair from the lounge while her daughter talked politics across the room with Rhodey, Cap, and the Russians, “Dirt is good at Dragorin, but soldiers came.” she shrugged and stroked the cat, which had fallen asleep beside her and took up nearly as much of the chair as she did. “So we go. Is happen before. We come back always.”

“Told you so,” Tony murmured to Wanda as he broke down the upconverter and encoder for transport back to the land of tech behaving as it was designed to do.

She gave him back a look at once tart and grateful, but Wilson spoke up before she’d chosen a comeback.

“Your English is very good, Babka Dynya” he observed, flawlessly polite, despite the unspoken and very pointed question lurking behind the compliment.

The old woman cackled at him and stroked the cat again. “Yes. My son, he teach me. Is better fast than you German, yes Mister Brown?”

 _Mr. Brown?_ Tony wondered. Wilson only replied with a head shake and a smile of chagrin though.

Wanda held up a flattened slab of red clay then – like one of those cheap little plaster hand-prints new parents always seemed to think were cute. “You made this, didn’t you?” She asked, nodding toward Steve, “for him?”

“Yes,” Dynya straightened, leaned forward made a grabby gesture that needed no translation, “Give.”

“But what was it for?” Wanda asked as she brought it to the chair and handed it over, “what was it supposed to do?”

Dynya took the tablet in her tiny hands, gave it a sour look as she turned it over once, and then abruptly smashed it on the stone floor. “Wrong thing,” she said into the startled silence that followed, either unconcerned by the sudden appearance of several guns around the room, or unaware of it altogether. “He is not Wyr, but also not _Wailos_ , and so is all wrong. Here,” she struggled out from under the massive cat, who hardly seemed to notice except to flap his tail once or twice, “I bring for him better thing.”

She fished in the pocket of her dress for a moment then, and came out with a strip of braided leather, strung with a few beads of the same red clay, as well as a pair of what looked like long, pointed animal teeth. But in the center of the whole arrangement, hung a little tin shield, so old and worn that nearly all its original paint was gone. Tony recognized it at once.

“That’s… that’s from the Funmeier Cap & Commandos play set,” Tony breathed, reaching toward, but not touching, the tiny scuffed disc, “1956 Christmas release. My dad has… had one of these in his office when I was a kid.”

“Is good,” the woman announced, whipping the weird hippy necklace out of reach and then patting Tony’s outstretched hand before he could evade her, “Good for keeping safe.” Then she marched across the main room, straight up to Steve, and thrust her handicraft at him with an expectant glare.

“Babka...” Laranova sighed, reproachful but resigned as Steve politely and with clear bafflement, took the necklace from her. “You had better put it on,” she told him as he began to fidget under the old lady’s regard. “She made it special for you.”

“Thank you,” Steve said, ever the gentleman.

“Here, let me,” Natasha said, slipping behind him and standing on tiptoe to tie the thing closed around his blushing neck. “Very dashing,” she then pronounced it over the sound of Barnes trying not to snicker. Tony didn’t bother – he snickered openly. Privilege of the attachment unspoken meant that he didn’t have to pretend it wasn’t ridiculous seeing Cap in a set of ‘break glass in case of naked’ sweats from the Quinjet, with some old ladies’ macrame friendship necklace dangling at his collarbones.

“Now you take shape,” Dynya said, gimlet stare still fixed on Steve, “take shape and you see.”

“What, right here?” Steve asked, suddenly pink, “Now?”

“Might as well, Steve,” Wilson called out what they were all thinking, “Ain’t like you got any secrets left in this crowd.”

Barnes though, gave Laranova a knowing look, and then nudged Steve toward the bathroom, saying, “No need to ruin another set of clothes, Stevie. Just scratch at the door when you’re done, and we’ll let you out.”

“You’re not funny,” Steve told him as he went, even though from where Tony was standing, that was a total lie.

None of them pretended not to be listening for the change, seeing as how the only one who’d gotten to see Steve’s egregious breach of the law of thermodynamics thus far was Barnes. But there was no screaming, no crunch of bone or shredding tendon, no wet splatters, no weighty thrashing from inside the small lav. The only sign they had of Steve’s change was the rustle of clothing dropped, a single thud of weight dropped from a height, and then a strange sort of sigh, as of air displaced and echoing from the tiles. Then the door, which Steve had apparently not fully closed, swung open, and instead of a massive tawny dire wolf, a hound came out.

“What the…?” Rhodey muttered, and silently, Tony agreed.

Steve was still large – tall and leggy now rather than the massive apex predator he’d been that morning. [He was slender in a way that made Tony think of greyhounds, only instead of lying close and flat to his skin, Steve’s pelt curled thickly all over, drifting into long, silken feathers on his legs, tail, and softly drooping ears. He was still the color of the sun, with eyes the same, piercing sky blue, but he was now a creature that could walk into a human town without being shot on sight.](https://66.media.tumblr.com/daf79df21fbf6b56b0aa681d359f17f8/tumblr_pgtnknWvC11sl8gj8o1_1280.jpg)

“Borzoi,” Romanoff sighed, and dropped at once to her knees so she could pet Steve’s ears. “Oh, you’re beautiful like this!”

Tony looked away as Steve’s eyes drooped in pleasure, and told himself he was absolutely not jealous. “Do I even want to ask how you did that?” he muttered to the smug old woman beside him.

“You ask,” she shrugged, “but I don’t answer. Is only confuse you.”

“What about me, Babka?” Barnes asked, his voice rough with longing he clearly didn’t feel like hiding, “Could you do that for me too?”

Dynya gave him a considering look, then leaned up close to him and said “Show.” Then she made that grabby hand gesture again until he leaned down and let her take his chin in her hand. “ _Urhtaz,_ ” she murmured, turning it to and fro, and ignoring the small, protesting sound Laranova made, as if the word had been some kind of profanity. 

The old woman checked Barnes’ teeth, his eyes, pulled up his shirt to peer at the stump of his arm, and the claw marks on his chest, and then finally shook her head with a sigh. “Dirt is no good for you,” she told him at last, letting his shirt fall with a regretful pat to his remaining arm. “You broke too much.”

Tony looked away from the abrupt shuttering of hope from the man’s eyes. It wasn’t his circus, and it definitely wasn’t his dancing bear, only… well, he remembered what it had been like, trying to race Palladium to a cure, and being told over and over again that he was too sick, too broken; that there were just no good odds. That he should make his peace, and accept what couldn’t be changed.

Steve whined at the pronouncement, trotted anxiously to Barnes’ side, but Dynya wasn’t quite done, apparently. “Only stones good enough for you now,” she said, and grabbed Barnes’ hand, towing him along to where she’d set her basket down behind the front door.

Baffled, he followed, and waited while she dug, and came up with another string of beads – or rather, Tony realized as they caught the light, of smallish rocks that had been polished and drilled through the middle. She chose one with a thick stripe of white quartz sparkling through its heart, and pulled it off the string, letting the ones before it clatter into the basket.

“Here. For next moon, to stop crazy.” She dropped the bead into his hand, then patted his fingers closed around it. “Wear here,” she patted her throat, then the inside of her wrist, “or here. Girl will make for you.” Then she turned, scooped up the basket, and barked a peremptory, “Girl!” back toward the dining room.

It was obvious that the summons did not refer to her own daughter, but Wanda still took a defiantly long time dusting herbs from her hands before she got up and went where she’d been called. Tony couldn’t say he blamed her, really.

“Yes, Babka?” she asked, giving Barnes a sympathetic smile as they passed by the coats.

The woman dropped the beads back into the basket, then picked it up and shoved it at Wanda so the girl had to grab it, or drop it. “Take,” she said, nodding with something like approval as red light bloomed from Wanda’s fingers and threaded down into the basket like a cool, heavy vapor. Tony had to quell a shiver to see it, but the old lady seemed to be nothing but proud. “Use. Make work. It will teach you. Good dirt knows good seed.” She patted Wanda’s hands as the girl stared, wide eyed, into the basket of mysteries. “When you use up, you come back to Dragorin, we talk.”

Then she turned to her compatriot – or maybe her escort, Tony supposed, – and announced, “Durya. I am tired.”

And the mastermind of the rebellion hopped to at once.

“Of course, Babka,” Laranova said, slipping Rhodey’s card and list of state department phone numbers into her pocket as she turned to go, only to find Natasha falling into step beside her. 

“What about metal,” Romanoff asked, blunt and unashamed as Steve, still in fur, returned to Barnes’ side, and Babka Dynya went to collect the cat and drape him across her shoulders like a sleepily complaining orange shawl. “For him. It stopped the bear for years. Decades. Could it do so again?”

“Maybe so,” Laranova shrugged, clearly skeptical, “but even if you stop the change, the bear will still be inside him; trapped, restless, angry. Better to let it free sometimes, than to make it break out, I think. Less to hurt that way.”

“Like the Hulk,” Tony said, falling in on Romanoff’s other side. “Sometimes Big Green’s gotta blow off steam so he can stay focused when it counts.” He was eager already for Bruce’s reaction when he finally returned and Tony got to share this new development with him. The Science on all this hocus pocus was gonna be _epic_!

“Metal, stone,” came the old woman’s voice from behind them as they reached the door, “They are not difference.”

Tony grinned his best nonna-charming grin so he wouldn’t be tempted to try and explain basic geochemistry to this weird, Baltic granny-shaman, but the ferocity in her eyes as she grabbed his right hand cut right through his forced cheer.

“And you,” she told him, dark eyes knowing and grave as she held tight against his reflexive jerk, “You, watch for stars, not the moon. It will come soon now; this you know.” 

Then she patted his hand, aware, surely, of the sharp-edged wave of panic that washed over Tony at her words, but not apparently sorry for it. “Be ready,” she ordered, as if such a thing was even remotely possible.

Then she took her daughter’s arm like some kind of Queen mum, and the three of them walked away into a bright mountain morning that seemed utterly unaware of the vast shadow that had just been thrown across it.

Tony stared after the retreating figures, his mind whirling, as it always did whenever someone invoked the intergalactic ghosts that had been haunting his dreams since the Tesseract punched a hole into the Manhattan sky. His fingers chilled as the icy air drifted in around him, helpless and stinging until a silken drift of fur slid warmly underneath Tony’s hand. He gripped as Steve braced against him, tangled his fingers like a lifeline into the warmth that he hadn’t ever dared to reach for before, even when he’d deeply, fearfully, needed it.

He needed it now. Good God, but he needed it now.

“Watch the stars, she said,” Tony murmured to the perfect blue sky, aware of the others gathering behind them, but unable, quite, to look away from the retreating forms, “Be ready, she said. But be ready for what?”

Nobody, it seemed, had an answer.

~* Fin *~

**Author's Note:**

> Unbeknownst to her, this work was inspired by a ficlet request from [sarah_holmes](), when she was feeling down, and I was feeling ambitious. By now, she's almost certainly forgotten all about the whole thing, but me? I never did. It just took me a few years to do it justice, is all.
> 
> Also, thanks to [Dappermouth](http://dappermouth.tumblr.com/post/179470880281/dappermouth-visions-on-a-night-drive-like-lost), for her coincidental, unintentional illustration of Steve from chapter 10, and for agreeing to let me link to her work here.


End file.
